Tag: better future

  • Do You Really Want to See Change?

    Do You Really Want to See Change?

    I have a confession to make.

    I want millions of people to read my novel Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity. I want it to reach mainstream media, become the subject of discussions and debates around the world, and hopefully even become a major motion picture with the message eventually  reaching hundreds of millions of people.

    That might sound like hubris. Or perhaps you think I simply want to sell a lot of books.

    Probably a little bit of both.

    Yes, I would love to sell a lot of books. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

    But there is something far more important behind my ambition.

    I genuinely, honestly, and deeply want to see change in this world.

    Not just another political reform. Not another government promising to fix what the previous government failed to fix. Not just another redistribution of wealth that leaves the detrimental structures of civilization untouched.

    I want humanity to begin questioning the very foundations upon which our civilization has been built.

    Because I truly believe that many of our greatest problems have a common denominator: 

    a system based on money, trading, and ownership of the resources upon which everyone depends.

    And I believe there is another way.

    What If We Could Actually Do This?

    Imagine a world where nobody has to worry about having enough money to survive. Where food, housing, healthcare, education, transportation, and everything else people need are available through cooperation and intelligent resource management assisted by AI.

    Imagine a world where ownership has been replaced by stewardship. Where the resources of our planet are no longer treated primarily as commodities to be bought, sold, accumulated, and exploited, but as a shared inheritance to be cared for and managed for the benefit of everyone.

    Imagine a civilization where advanced technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation are used to liberate humanity from unnecessary labor rather than simply to increase profits for those who own the technology.

    A world where people are free to contribute according to their interests, talents, and passions, rather than being forced to sell their time simply to have a life.

    A world where humanity cooperates to create abundance, restore nature, eliminate poverty, and make life on Earth as wonderful as possible for everyone.

    Does that sound impossible?

    Perhaps it does.

    But what if it isn’t?

    the greatest obstacle

    What if the greatest obstacle isn’t a lack of resources, technology, or intelligence, but our inability to imagine organizing civilization differently?

    What if money, trading, and ownership are the very culprits of our problems and not indispensable foundations of civilization, but rather human inventions that have served their purposes and are now increasingly standing in the way of what humanity could become?

    What if we could actually create a world that works for everyone?

    A Novel, Not a Manifesto

    This is why I wrote Waking Up.

    Not as a political manifesto. Not as an economic textbook. And certainly not as a detailed blueprint for a new civilization.

    It’s a novel.

    A story about the bewildered billionaire Benjamin Michaels, a contemporary man who wakes up a hundred years into the future and discovers that humanity has created a civilization completely beyond his imagination.

    Money has disappeared. Trading has become obsolete. Ownership has been replaced by stewardship. Humanity has learned to organize its resources cooperatively, guided by advanced artificial intelligence and a fundamentally different understanding of what civilization is supposed to accomplish.

    Through Benjamin’s eyes, readers discover this world gradually, along with its history, its technologies, its relationships, its challenges, and its extraordinary possibilities.

    And, of course, not everyone is happy with the new world. There  is an antagonist who would prefer to return to the old system.

    Because Waking Up is, first and foremost, a story.

    But behind that story is an invitation.

    An invitation to imagine something different.

    I don’t expect readers to agree with everything in the book. I don’t expect them to believe that every technological or social development I describe will become reality.

    What I hope is that, somewhere along the journey, readers might begin to think:

    Wait a minute. This could actually work.

    And perhaps, by the time they finish the book, they might find themselves thinking:

    This is the world I want to live in. This is the future I want for my children.

    That is the seed I want to plant.

    When an Idea Takes Root

    I believe true and lasting change begins with an idea.

    And mind you, this is not my idea. I didn’t wake up one morning with a sudden eureka moment, realizing that money, trading, and ownership were at the root of so many of humanity’s problems. No, throughout my life, I had a growing feeling that something was fundamentally wrong with the way our civilization was organized. I felt that humanity could do so much better, but I couldn’t quite see how. That changed in 2008, when I discovered The Venus Project and its vision of a global resource-based economy. Suddenly, so many things fell into place. It gave shape to something I had felt for years but hadn’t been able to articulate. That discovery eventually inspired me to write Waking Up, a novel that I now genuinely believe could help change the world if enough people read it. Not because I have invented some revolutionary new idea, but because I hope to help an existing idea take root in the minds and hearts of humanity.

    Not just any idea, but an idea that makes sense to people. An idea that offers a genuinely desirable alternative to something they previously considered impossible.

    At first, a world without money, trading, and ownership probably seem absurd.

    People might laugh at the suggestion.

    They might say that human nature makes it impossible. That people are too selfish. That nobody would contribute without financial incentives. That civilization would collapse without prices, wages, profits, and ownership.

    But then perhaps they read a story that makes them reconsider.

    Perhaps they begin to see how such a civilization might function.

    And suddenly, the impossible becomes a question.

    Could this actually work?

    That question is enormously important.

    Because once people begin asking whether something is possible, they can start exploring how to make it possible.

    And when enough people begin to believe that a different civilization is not only possible but desirable, something extraordinary can happen.

    The idea Takes root

    It spreads from person to person. From conversations between friends to discussions in families, schools, universities, workplaces, and communities.

    Scientists begin considering the technological possibilities. Engineers begin exploring practical solutions.

    Economists question old assumptions. Communities experiment with new forms of cooperation. Artificial intelligence helps people develop and evaluate ideas that might previously have been beyond their reach.

    And eventually, the conversation changes.

    Instead of asking why a different world cannot work, people begin asking:

    How can we get from here to there?

    That is when real change begins.

    Revolution by Force

    There is, however, something absolutely fundamental about how this transformation must happen.

    It cannot be imposed from above.

    Humanity has already experienced revolutions in which one ruling elite was overthrown, only to be replaced by another.

    Consider the Russian Revolution more than a hundred years ago.

    It emerged from profound dissatisfaction with inequality, exploitation, and the concentration of power. Many of those who supported it genuinely believed they were helping create a fairer society.

    But the Soviet system that followed eventually developed its own powerful ruling elite, with enormous authority concentrated in the hands of relatively few people.

    Whatever the original intentions, the promised liberation did not unfold as many had hoped.

    I don’t want humanity to repeat that mistake.

    I don’t want a new revolutionary leadership taking power and deciding how everyone else should live.

    I don’t want another ideology imposed through coercion, fear, or violence.

    And I certainly don’t want a new elite claiming ownership of a world that is supposed to be based on sharing and stewardship.

    That would defeat the entire purpose.

    We cannot force humanity into a better world. We must inspire humanity to want to create one together.

    And that is precisely why the idea must spread as far and wide as possible.

    It must take deep roots in the minds and hearts of humanity, not merely among a handful of intellectuals, politicians, or visionaries.

    It must become something people understand, believe in, and genuinely want.

    Not because somebody has told them what to think, but because they have considered the possibilities for themselves.

    Only then can a transformation of this magnitude become something fundamentally different from the revolutions of the past.

    Not a struggle for control of a new system.

    But a collective decision to create something better.

    A Transformation of Human Understanding

    Ultimately, what I envision is not merely an economic transformation.

    It is a transformation of human understanding itself.

    For thousands of years, humanity has organized much of its civilization around competition for resources, territorial control, ownership, trading, and the accumulation of wealth.

    These arrangements have become so deeply embedded in our thinking that many people regard them as natural and unavoidable.

    But they are not laws of nature.

    They are human arrangements based on ideas.

    Unfortunately these ideas has led to a lot of suffering.

    But human arrangements can change based on new ideas.

    What if people began to understand that the purpose of civilization is not to generate profits, accumulate wealth, or maintain economic growth for its own sake?

    What if the purpose of civilization were simply to make life as good as possible for everyone, while caring for the planet that makes life possible?

    That would change the questions humanity asks.

    Instead of asking whether there is enough money to feed everyone, we would ask whether there is enough food, land, water, technology, and productive capacity.

    Instead of asking whether healthcare is profitable, we would ask how to make the best possible healthcare available to everyone.

    Instead of asking how many jobs automation might eliminate, we would ask how much unnecessary labor it could relieve humanity of.

    Instead of asking who can afford a home, we would ask how to provide good homes for everyone who needs one.

    And instead of asking how to compete more effectively against other nations, we could begin asking how to cooperate more effectively across the entire planet.

    The possibilities are enormous.

    But to recognize them, we first have to change how we think.

    The Intelligence Within 

    I don’t claim to have all the answers.

    Far from it.

    I believe the answers are already embedded in humanity itself.

    In billions of minds. In our accumulated knowledge, our scientific discoveries, our creativity, our compassion, our curiosity, and our extraordinary ability to solve problems together.

    No single person could possibly design an entirely new civilization.

    Nor should anyone attempt to dictate one.

    What I envision would have to emerge through collaboration, communication, experimentation, and the collective intelligence of humanity.

    And I believe this requires something more than the short-sighted intelligence of the ego.

    The ego tends to ask: What’s in it for me? How can I win? How can I gain more power, wealth, or control?

    That way of thinking has influenced human civilization for a very long time.

    Another Kind of Intelligence

    But there is another kind of intelligence available to us.

    An intelligence rooted in love, understanding, empathy, curiosity, and the recognition that the well-being of others matters just as much as our own.

    An intelligence that asks:

    What can we create together?

    How can we make life better for everyone?

    How can we care for this extraordinary planet and all the beings living upon it?

    I believe this deeper intelligence exists within every human being.

    And perhaps the greatest challenge facing humanity is not developing more powerful technology, but learning to use our intelligence and technology together, guided by wisdom rather than fear, competition, and the desire for control.

    That is how I envision real and lasting change.

    Not through domination.

    Not through violence.

    But through love, understanding, curiosity, and cooperation.

    All the Answers

    I Don’t Have All the Answers. Humanity Does.

    This is also why I don’t consider Waking Up a finished proposal for how civilization should function.

    It’s a starting point. An inspiration. 

    A glimpse of a possible future

    I have spent many years thinking about these ideas, and I have tried to imagine what that civilization based on sharing, stewardship, and intelligent resource management might look like.

    But I am only one person.

    There are countless questions I haven’t answered. Countless challenges I haven’t considered. Countless solutions that other people might discover.

    And that’s exactly the point.

    The purpose of the book is not to provide every answer.

    It is to inspire people to start asking different questions.

    Because once enough people genuinely want to create a world that works for everyone, humanity can begin directing its collective intelligence toward that goal.

    Not following one person’s blueprint.

    Not obeying a new political elite.

    But collaborating to discover the best ways forward.

    Different communities might experiment with different approaches. Some ideas would work. Others would fail and need to be reconsidered. New technologies would open new possibilities. New insights would emerge.

    And gradually, through learning and cooperation, something extraordinary might take shape.

    What humanity needs is an idea powerful enough to inspire people to start finding those answers together.

    Why I’m Asking You to Share This

    So now, perhaps you understand why I want my book to reach as many people as possible.

    Why I hope it will attract the attention of mainstream media.

    Why I would love to see it become a major motion picture, reaching audiences around the world.

    And why I keep asking people to share my articles and recommend Waking Up to their friends.

    Yes, I want to sell books.

    Of course I do.

    But if selling books were my primary motivation, I should probably have written something entirely different.

    I wrote Waking Up because I genuinely believe humanity can create a much better world than the one we have today.

    A world without poverty, without economic exploitation, without the constant struggle for money, and without the enormous waste of human potential and resources that our current arrangements produce.

    A world where people are free to live meaningful lives, contribute according to their interests and abilities, and enjoy the extraordinary possibilities that science, technology, and human cooperation can offer.

    Our Shared Home

    A world where humanity finally begins treating planet Earth as a shared home rather than a collection of territories and resources to be owned, exploited, and fought over.

    And I believe the first step toward such a world is for enough people to begin imagining it.

    To genuinely want it.

    To believe that it might be possible.

    Because when an idea takes root deeply enough in humanity, it can become much more powerful than any individual who first expressed it.

    Think of ideas like democracy, the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and universal human rights. All challenged deeply rooted beliefs about how society should function. They spread, inspired people, and gradually transformed the world. What once seemed impossible eventually became something billions of people considered self-evident.

    It can become a shared vision.

    And a shared vision will inspire collective action.

    That is why I am asking you to help spread the word.

    Not because I want everyone to agree with me.

    Not because I want people to follow me.

    But because I want the idea to grow beyond me, beyond my book, and beyond anything I could possibly accomplish on my own.

    I want people to question it, challenge it, improve it, and make it their own.

    I want it to take root so deeply and spread so widely that no individual, organization, government, or elite can ever claim ownership of it.

    Because the future of humanity should belong to humanity.

    Do You Really Want to See Change?

    If so, imagine a fundamental transformation of civilization itself.

    Imagine humanity finally realizing that it doesn’t have to continue organizing life around competition, trading, ownership, and  money for survival.

    Imagine billions of people beginning to ask how to create a world that truly works for everyone.

    And imagine what might happen when they start collaborating to make it real.

    I don’t know exactly how that future will unfold.

    Nobody does.

    But I believe it can begin with something remarkably simple.

    An idea.

    An idea that inspires people.

    An idea that people believe in.

    An idea that takes root.

    An idea who’s time has come.

    Benjamin Michaels wakes up to a new world. I want humanity to wake up to the possibility of creating one.

    That is why I wrote Waking Up.

    And that is why, if you’ve read the book and enjoyed it, I hope you’ll recommend it to others. And if this article resonates with you, I hope you will share it too.

    I thank you from the depth of my heart

    Not merely to help me sell more books.

    But to help an idea take root in the world.

    Discover the story

  • Universal High Income – And Why It Will Not Work

    Universal High Income – And Why It Will Not Work

    You cannot create abundance by creating and distributing  more money. You can only create abundance by producing more of what people actually need. And distribute that.

    Elon Musk has repeatedly predicted a future in which artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation will make human labor largely unnecessary. He has even suggested that money itself may eventually become irrelevant.

    At the same time, he has introduced the idea of Universal High Income (UHI), which is a high basic income where everyone receives enough money to enjoy a high standard of living, regardless of whether they work on not.

    It sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

    Machines do all the work, everyone receives a generous income, and humanity is finally liberated from the necessity of working for a living.

    But there is a fundamental problem with this vision.

    Universal High Income attempts to create universal abundance through a monetary system that cannot guarantee it.

    And the reasons are surprisingly simple.

    1. Resources – Money Does Not Create Resources

    Imagine that tomorrow morning, everyone on Earth wakes up to discover that one million euros has been deposited into their bank account.

    Wonderful! Everyone is suddenly a millionaire!

    But what has actually changed?

    Has a single additional house been built? Has one extra tomato been grown? Has another hospital opened? Has more electricity been generated? Are there suddenly more resources available to humanity?

    No.

    The world contains exactly the same physical resources and productive capacity as it did yesterday.

    The only difference is that everyone now has much more money with which to compete for those resources.

    Money is not food. Money is not housing. Money is not energy. Money is simply a means of gaining access to these things within the monetary system.

    Of course, additional purchasing power can stimulate production where unused capacity exists. But production still requires actual resources, energy, infrastructure, and technology.

    And if those resources are already being used to their limits, distributing more money will not magically create more of them.

    You cannot print abundance. You have to produce it.

    This is the first and most fundamental problem with Universal High Income.

    2. Prices – Supply and Demand Will Absorb the Money

    The second problem is built into the monetary system itself.

    Supply and demand.

    When more people have more money to spend, demand increases. And when demand increases faster than supply, prices tend to rise.

    Imagine a city with 10,000 available apartments and 100,000 people who would like to live in them.

    Now imagine everyone suddenly receives €10,000 per month through Universal High Income.

    Does that create another 90,000 apartments?

    Of course not.

    Instead, many more people can now afford to compete for the same limited number of apartments.

    Landlords and property owners discover that tenants can pay considerably more. Rents rise. Property prices rise.

    An apartment that previously rented for €1,000 per month might eventually cost €5,000 or more.

    And suddenly, that wonderful €10,000 monthly income doesn’t seem quite so wonderful anymore. Because prices have not only gone up on rent, but everything. When everyone suddenly have more money prices will automatically go up. That’s how our monetary system works. 

    The same principle applies to food, energy, water, land, and other necessities whenever supply cannot keep up with demand.

    Even if automation makes televisions, computers, clothing, and countless manufactured products cheaper, it does not automatically make desirable land, housing, or every essential resource equally abundant.

    And what happens when governments increase UHI to compensate for rising prices?

    More purchasing power enters the market, potentially driving prices even higher.

    Higher incomes. Higher demand. Higher prices. Another increase in income.

    Standard of Living

    The cycle can continue without necessarily improving people’s actual standard of living.

    And there is another important consideration. What constitutes a high standard of living is highly subjective.

    Some people may feel they need a luxurious mansion, several expensive cars, and countless possessions to be satisfied with their lives, while others may be perfectly happy living in a modest three-bedroom apartment with everything they need.

    There is no universal definition of how much is enough.

    And perhaps this points to something even more fundamental. Maybe humanity needs to reconsider not only its economic system, but also what it values, what it considers prosperity, and what actually makes people happy.

    Because creating a world of abundance should not mean encouraging everyone to consume as much as possible. It should mean creating a world where everyone has the opportunity to live a fulfilling life according to their own needs, interests, and preferences, while respecting the needs of others and the limits of our planet.

    Of course, prices will not rise equally everywhere. Where production can expand rapidly enough, additional supply can satisfy increased demand without major price increases.

    But this only reinforces the central point.

    It is the availability of actual goods and resources, not the amount of money people receive, that ultimately determines their material standard of living.

    Universal High Income does not guarantee universal high purchasing power.

    And a world full of millionaires is not necessarily a world full of abundance.

    3. Eroded taxes – Who Will Pay for the Universal High Income?

    There is another problem that becomes particularly interesting when considering the future Musk describes.

    Where will the money come from?

    Today, governments collect taxes from employment income, business profits, consumption, property, and other economic activities.

    But what happens when AI and robotics replace an enormous proportion of human employment?

    If millions or billions of people no longer receive wages, governments will lose a substantial part of their traditional income-tax and payroll-tax revenues.

    At the very moment when they would need enormous amounts of money to finance Universal High Income, one of their major sources of revenue could be disappearing.

    Of course, governments could tax the corporations that own the robots and automated factories instead.

    But consider what that means.

    The corporations produce the goods and services. People receive money from the government to purchase those same goods and services. The corporations receive that money, and the government then taxes the corporations to finance the next round of payments.

    Money circulates from governments to consumers, from consumers to corporations, and from corporations back to governments.

    Such a system is not mathematically impossible. Governments already redistribute money through taxation and public spending.

    But why preserve this elaborate financial arrangement if the machines are already capable of producing what everyone needs?

    Why not concentrate on making the actual goods and services available instead?

    And there is another important question.

    Who owns those machines?

    4. The Owners Will Still Own Everything

    Universal High Income does not fundamentally change the ownership structure of the monetary system.

    Far from it. If anything, it reenforces it.

    Land still belongs to landowners. Factories still belong to corporations. Automated production systems still belong to whoever owns them.

    And everyone else still needs money to access what those owners control.

    As long as there are still owners there will be rich and poor.

    Imagine a future in which millions of humanoid robots produce food, construct buildings, manufacture products, and provide services.

    Human labor has become largely unnecessary.

    But if the robots, factories, land, and resources remain concentrated in relatively few hands, everyone else remains dependent on purchasing access to their output.

    Universal High Income could then become a mechanism for distributing purchasing power to the population while preserving the existing concentration of productive ownership.

    The owners receive money from consumers, while consumers depend on governments to provide that money.

    Even if everyone receives a generous income, the underlying relationship remains.

    Some own the productive resources. Others pay to access them.

    The technology has changed, but the economic structure has not.

    Why would we want such a world?

    Where a tiny elite owns most everything while the rest are dependent on government payouts?

    And this brings us to an interesting contradiction in Musk’s vision.

    5. Elon Musk’s Contradiction

    Elon Musk is working tirelessly to develop technologies that could eventually eliminate the necessity for much of human labor.

    Through artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation, he is helping create the technological foundation for a world in which machines could perform an extraordinary proportion of the tasks necessary to sustain human civilization.

    He has also suggested that money may eventually become irrelevant.

    Yet he continues to describe the future in terms of Universal High Income.

    But why?

    If AI and robotics can produce practically everything humanity needs, why should everyone need a high income to purchase those things?

    If money is becoming irrelevant, why introduce another mechanism that makes everyone dependent on receiving it?

    Why keep money at all??

    And perhaps most importantly, why is the discussion so focused on how much money people might receive rather than who will own and control the automated production systems?

    As long as there are owners of the world’s resources and productive systems there will always be an imbalance in our world. An imbalance that historically has led to countless conflicts and wars.

    Sensational Predictions

    I sometimes wonder whether all these sensational predictions about Universal High Income, the end of work, and the disappearance of money are mostly meant to distract from the much more fundamental questions:

    Who will own the robots and factories? Who will control the resources? Who will decide what gets produced? And who will benefit from the extraordinary abundance these technologies could make possible?

    I cannot know Musk’s true intentions. But I would certainly like to hear him address these questions more directly.

    Because the future of humanity is not fundamentally about how much money everyone will receive.

    It is about what humanity can produce sustainably, how those resources are managed, and whether everyone can benefit.

    6. The Real Opportunity of AI and Robotics

    Here is where the discussion becomes truly exciting.

    For most of human history, producing the necessities of life has required enormous amounts of human labor.

    People had to cultivate fields, build houses, manufacture products, transport goods, and perform countless other tasks.

    The monetary system developed around this world of human labor, exchange, ownership, and scarcity.

    But what happens when technology changes the fundamental conditions?

    What happens when automated systems can grow food, construct buildings, manufacture goods, transport resources, maintain infrastructure, and perform most of the work necessary to sustain civilization?

    For the first time in history, humanity may be approaching the technological capacity to provide an abundant standard of living for everyone without requiring everyone to work for it.

    That is an extraordinary opportunity.

    But instead of asking how to distribute enough money for everyone to purchase this abundance, shouldn’t the question be how to organize the production and distribution of the abundance itself?

    We have established that more money does not lead to more resources.

    The Real Questions

    These are the real questions we must ask:

    What resources are available?

    How can we optimize them?

    What does everyone need?

    How much can be produced sustainably?

    How can technology coordinate production and distribution so that everyone’s needs can be met while preserving the planet’s ecosystems?

    These are questions AI could help humanity answer.

    And they lead directly toward a resource-based economy.

    7. From Universal High Income to Universal High Living Standards

    Imagine a world where housing, food, energy, transportation, healthcare, education, and communication are available to everyone without monetary transactions.

    Not because everything is infinitely abundant, but because humanity has organized its resources and productive capacity around meeting people’s needs rather than generating financial returns.

    In such a world, AI and robotics would continuously monitor available resources, production capacity, environmental conditions, and actual demand.

    Production could be adjusted according to what people need and what the planet can sustainably provide.

    Resources that remain scarce would still require responsible allocation. Technology cannot create unlimited land, water, or raw materials. But it can help optimize and maximize what we have.

    But scarcity would no longer automatically mean that those with the most money receive the most.

    Instead of ownership, humanity could develop a system of stewardship, where the Earth’s resources are managed for the benefit of everyone. 

    We would be stewards of Earth instead of owners.

    And instead of measuring prosperity through income, it could be measured through actual living standards, access to necessities, personal freedom, health, well-being, and environmental sustainability.

    Nobody would need to become a millionaire to live an abundant life.

    Nobody would need to receive Universal High Income to access the products of automated production.

    The objective would no longer be universal financial wealth.

    It would be universal real wealth.

    8. Why Preserve the Bottleneck?

    Money is an intermediary bottleneck between human needs and the resources required to satisfy them.

    Today, someone can be hungry while food is available, homeless while houses stand empty, or unable to obtain medical treatment even though the necessary technology and expertise exist.

    Not necessarily because the resources are unavailable, but because access to them depends on money.

    Universal High Income attempts to address this problem by giving everyone more money.

    But it leaves the bottleneck in place.

    It leaves prices in place.

    It leaves competition for purchasing power in place.

    And it leaves the concentration of ownership completely untouched.

    If AI and robotics eventually provide humanity with the productive capacity to satisfy everyone’s needs, why should access to that production continue to depend on a financial mechanism?

    Why should people need money to obtain what society is technologically capable of providing?

    The question is no longer simply how to make everyone rich.

    It is how to create a world in which everyone can live richly, regardless of money.

    Conclusion: 

    Abundance Is Not a Number in a Bank Account

    Universal High Income is an understandable response to a future in which AI and robotics may eliminate enormous amounts of human employment.

    And as a transitional measure, income guarantees could help protect people from poverty and economic disruption in the transition to a world of real wealth.

    You cannot print money and think it is abundance.

    You have to produce it. And once you can produce it for everyone, why should anyone need money to access it?

    This is the future I explore in the novel Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, where a the bewildered billionaire Benjamin Michaels  awakens a century from now to discover that humanity has moved beyond money, trade, and ownership toward a cooperative, resource-based civilization.

    Discover the story

  • We Have Finally Agreed

    We Have Finally Agreed

    For thousands of years, humanity fought over the planet we inhabit.

    Kings, emperors, dictators, despots and governments tried to conquer as much territory as possible. Nations formed alliances, broke alliances, invaded their neighbors, defended their borders, and sacrificed millions of lives in the pursuit of power, territory, resources, and security.

    And what did we achieve?

    War after war after war. Death after death. Destruction after destruction.

    We built civilizations, destroyed them, and built them again. We conquered territories, lost them, and fought to regain them. We drew borders across the planet, moved them through violence, and defended them with ever more sophisticated weapons.

    And for a very long time, we believed this was simply the way the world had to be.

    Until, at long last, we agreed.

    Enough was enough.

    The Fatigue of War

    Looking back at the early twenty-first century, the pattern was painfully familiar.

    Russia and Ukraine. Israel and Palestine. And countless other conflicts, large and small, across the planet.

    People killing people. Homes destroyed. Families torn apart. Children growing up without parents. Parents burying their children. Millions displaced, injured, traumatized, or permanently disabled.

    And for what?

    Territory? Resources? Political power? National pride? Security?

    War had become so familiar that many people regarded it as an inevitable part of human civilization.

    Every generation inherited the fears, resentments, territorial claims, and unfinished conflicts of previous generations.

    When one war ended, another seemed to begin. Sometimes the same conflict erupted again decades later, with new weapons, new leaders, and new generations of young people sent to fight.

    And when the fighting stopped, we rebuilt what we had destroyed.

    We buried our dead, cared for the wounded, negotiated new agreements, and prepared ourselves for the possibility of doing it all again.

    What an astonishing waste of human life, intelligence, energy, and resources.

    But perhaps the greatest tragedy was that we rarely questioned the foundation upon which this endless cycle rested.

    We argued about who was right and who was wrong, who had the legitimate claim, who had attacked first, and who had the right to defend themselves.

    And while these questions certainly mattered to those involved, they seldom brought us any closer to eliminating the underlying problem.

    The Illusion of Security

    For millennia, humanity pursued security through control.

    A ruler conquered territory to secure resources for his people. A nation expanded its borders to protect itself from potential enemies. Governments built armies, fortifications, and increasingly powerful weapons to defend what they considered theirs.

    But there was a fundamental contradiction in this approach.

    Whatever we conquered, we had to defend. And whatever we defended, someone else might eventually try to conquer.

    The more territory and resources we controlled, the more we had to protect.

    And when our neighbors saw us strengthening our defenses, they often perceived us as a threat. So they strengthened theirs.

    We responded by strengthening ours even further.

    And the cycle continued.

    This was known as the security dilemma.

    One nation’s attempt to increase its security could make another nation feel less secure, creating an escalating cycle of fear, competition, and military preparation.

    The tragedy was that both sides could genuinely believe they were acting defensively.

    Yet their combined actions made everyone less secure.

    We had mistaken control for security.

    And for thousands of years, we tried to solve the insecurity created by this arrangement through even greater control.

    We invented increasingly sophisticated weapons, established military alliances, built enormous defense industries, and devoted extraordinary amounts of human ingenuity to preparing for conflicts we hoped would never happen.

    But the underlying problem remained.

    We had divided the planet into possessions, and every possession represented something that might be taken away.

    Who Owned the Earth?

    There was a question we should have asked ourselves much earlier.

    Who actually owned the Earth?

    Who created the continents, the oceans, the mountains, the forests, the rivers, and the fertile soil?

    Certainly not the kings, emperors, governments, corporations, or individuals who claimed ownership of them throughout history.

    The Earth had existed for billions of years before humanity appeared.

    Yet we divided it into territories and declared that this piece belonged to one nation, that piece belonged to another, and countless smaller pieces belonged to individuals, corporations, and institutions.

    We turned the surface of our common home into a gigantic collection of possessions.

    And then we spent thousands of years fighting over those possessions.

    We even developed elaborate legal systems to determine who owned which pieces of land, who could extract which resources, and who had the right to exclude everyone else.

    A person could be born on Earth and still have no right to occupy a tiny piece of it without paying someone else.

    An entire nation could lack access to resources that existed abundantly elsewhere on the same planet.

    And people could become extraordinarily wealthy simply by controlling access to things that nature had provided.

    All because we had accepted the idea that the Earth could be owned.

    But was that ever anything more than a human agreement?

    And if we had agreed to divide the planet into possessions, couldn’t we simply agree to stop?

    We Finally Grew Up

    So, this was how we lived for millennia.

    We conquered, defended, competed, accumulated, threatened, negotiated, and fought.

    We called it civilization.

    We called it national security.

    We called it the natural order of things.

    But eventually, something changed.

    We began to recognize that our extraordinary technological development had not been accompanied by an equally extraordinary development in how we organized our lives together.

    We could explore other planets, manipulate matter at microscopic scales, develop artificial intelligence, and automate increasingly complex tasks.

    Yet we continued fighting over ownership of the planet on which we were born.

    And finally, humanity had enough.

    We grew up.

    Not because everyone suddenly became wise as God, infinitely generous, or free from disagreement.

    But because we finally recognized that we could not continue trying to solve the same fundamental problem with the same fundamental thinking.

    We needed to change the foundation itself.

    And so we did.

    We drew a line through history.

    Not to erase what had happened, or forget those who had suffered, but to declare that the old claims of ownership would no longer determine humanity’s future.

    We nullified the ancient assumption that land and natural resources could belong exclusively to nations, corporations, or individuals.

    We started again.

    As adults.

    We finally agreed.

    The Declaration of Earth

    The declaration was remarkably simple.

    Planet Earth, including all its land, waters, atmosphere, and natural resources, was declared unowned and recognized as the common heritage of all humanity.

    No nation could claim exclusive ownership of a territory.

    No corporation could claim ownership of the planet’s natural resources.

    No individual could claim a piece of Earth as private property to be sold  and traded. Instead, we agreed on becoming stewards of Earth, caring for the land we live on.

    We had already established a similar principle for the Moon decades earlier, when humanity agreed that no nation could appropriate it through claims of sovereignty.

    Now we extended that principle to our own planet.

    Earth was not something to be possessed owned.

    It was our common home.

    And with that declaration came a new responsibility.

    We were no longer competing owners of separate pieces of a planet.

    We became its collective stewards.

    Of course, the declaration did not instantly transform every aspect of civilization. There were enormous practical questions to resolve, existing systems to reorganize, and centuries of habits and assumptions to overcome.

    But the fundamental decision had been made.

    We were no longer working toward a world in which everyone could never own enough.

    We were creating a world in which nobody needed to own anything in order to live well.

    And that changed everything.

    From Ownership to Stewardship

    One of the first things we changed was our relationship with the natural world.

    Forests were no longer regarded as somebody’s property from which financial profit could be extracted. They were recognized as living ecosystems providing countless benefits to the planet.

    Agricultural land was cultivated to provide nutritious food while maintaining the health of the soil.

    Homes were provided for people to live in, rather than treated as financial assets to be accumulated.

    Minerals, energy, water, and other resources were managed intelligently, sustainably, and cooperatively.

    We no longer asked how much money could be made from a particular resource. Money ceased to exist.

    We asked what it could contribute to the well-being of life on Earth.

    And because ownership had been replaced by stewardship, the responsibility for managing resources was based on knowledge, competence, ecological understanding, and the needs of the communities they served.

    We developed cooperative councils at different levels, from local communities to global coordination, helping ensure that decisions reflected both local circumstances and the needs of the planet as a whole.

    No single person, government, corporation, or artificial intelligence was granted ownership or absolute authority over Earth’s resources.

    We had learned enough from our history to understand the dangers of concentrating power.

    The End of the Monetary System

    Once we had abandoned ownership, another ancient institution lost its purpose.

    Money.

    For thousands of years, money had been the principal mechanism through which we distributed access to resources.

    Those with the greatest purchasing power could obtain the most, while those with little or no money often struggled to acquire even the necessities of life.

    This had produced a civilization in which enormous quantities of useful resources remained inaccessible to people who needed them, simply because they could not afford to pay.

    But now we had changed the underlying principle.

    Resources were no longer commodities to be owned and traded.

    They were part of our common inheritance, managed for the benefit of everyone.

    So we reorganized production and distribution around actual needs, available resources, ecological limits, and human preferences.

    Advanced artificial intelligence helped us understand resource availability, forecast demand, coordinate production, and minimize waste.

    Robotics and automation took over much of the repetitive, dangerous, and physically demanding work that humans had previously performed.

    And instead of competing to sell more and more products, we cooperated to produce what people actually needed and wanted, as sustainably and efficiently as possible.

    We no longer had to ask whether providing something was financially profitable.

    We asked whether it was useful, desirable, and physically possible.

    And as our productive capabilities expanded, we were able to provide increasingly abundant access to housing, nutritious food, clean water, energy, healthcare, education, transportation, communication, and countless other goods and services.

    Money and trading gradually became obsolete.

    Not because we had outlawed generosity or exchange between people, but because we had developed a far more direct way of sharing the abundance of our planet.

    What Happened to Security?

    Perhaps the most extraordinary transformation was in our understanding of security.

    Remember the security dilemma?

    For thousands of years, nations had tried to protect themselves by accumulating military power and controlling territory.

    But now the foundation of that dilemma had changed.

    Why would one community invade another to secure resources when those resources were already part of a globally coordinated system serving everyone?

    Why fight to control fertile land when food production was optimized and organized cooperatively?

    Why conquer territory when everyone had access to housing, healthcare, education, energy, and the necessities of life, regardless of where they were born?

    Human Disagreements

    The old incentives for territorial conquest had largely disappeared.

    Of course, human disagreements did not vanish.

    We still had different opinions, personalities, desires, traditions, and ways of life.

    And we still needed ways to resolve conflicts, protect people from harm, and address destructive behavior.

    But we no longer organized entire societies around the expectation that other societies might try to seize their possessions.

    The enormous military establishments of the past gave way to cooperative systems of protection, emergency response, disaster prevention, and peaceful conflict resolution.

    The human ingenuity once devoted to developing increasingly destructive weapons was redirected toward preserving and improving life.

    And we discovered something remarkable.

    Security no longer depended on how much of the Earth we could control. It depended on how well we could care for one another.

    Instead of securing the Earth against one another, we secured the Earth for one another.

    What Did We Achieve?

    Peace.

    Not the fragile peace that had once depended on military deterrence, political alliances, and the constant threat of retaliation or invasion.

    But a far more durable peace built upon shared access, cooperation, and the removal of many of the incentives that had driven humanity into conflict.

    Global Prosperity

    Not the prosperity of a wealthy minority surrounded by people struggling to survive, but a civilization in which everyone could benefit from global resources, humanity’s collective knowledge, technology, and productive capacity.

    Freedom

    Not merely the freedom to compete for money and possessions, but the freedom to live without the constant fear of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, or financial ruin.

    And perhaps most importantly, we gained something that had been extraordinarily difficult to achieve in the old world.

    A Common Purpose

    Instead of competing to maximize the wealth and power of separate nations, corporations, and individuals, we worked together to improve the conditions for life on Earth.

    We restored damaged ecosystems, regenerated forests, cleaned polluted rivers and oceans, and developed more sustainable ways of producing everything we needed.

    We designed cities around the well-being of their inhabitants rather than the profitability of real estate.

    We created communities where people could contribute according to their abilities, interests, and passions, without having to sell their labor merely to survive.

    And we began to measure our progress not by financial growth, but by the actual quality of life we were creating.

    How healthy were our ecosystems?

    How well were people living?

    How much freedom did they have to pursue their interests?

    How effectively were we using our resources?

    How much suffering could we prevent?

    How much beauty, knowledge, creativity, and joy could we bring into the world?

    These became the questions that guided our civilization.

    And the answers continued to improve.

    Welcome to the New World

    Looking back now, it seems almost incredible that it took humanity so long to arrive at such a simple realization.

    We did not need to own the Earth in order to enjoy everything it had to offer.

    We did not need to compete for its resources when we could cooperate in managing them.

    And we did not need to fight over the planet when we could share it.

    We had spent thousands of years trying to conquer the world.

    But our greatest achievement came when we finally stopped trying.

    We did not unite Earth under a single ruler or empire.

    We simply recognized that it was our common home, and that everyone deserved to benefit from it.

    It took us a few thousand years to grow up. 

    But we finally did.

    Our New Friend

    And now, we have a rather unusual new friend among us.

    Mr. Benjamin Michaels.

    Our bewildered billionaire, who recently woke up after spending a hundred years in cryonic preservation!

    As you can imagine, it has been quite a shock for him.

    In his former world, ownership was everything. The more you owned, the more powerful and secure you were considered to be.

    Benjamin was very good at that game. In fact, he was one of the richest people on the planet.

    And now?

    Well, now he has awakened in a world where nobody owns anything!

    No money. No buying or selling. No financial empires to build or protect.

    Everything is shared, and everyone has access to what they need.

    You can probably imagine his confusion.

    For him, it is almost as though the entire world has gone mad.

    For us, of course, it is simply normal life.

    But we understand him.

    After all, he spent his entire previous life learning how to succeed in a system that no longer exists.

    It takes time to adjust to something like that.

    Fortunately, he has me.

    Aweena.

    His personal guide, showing him all the ins and outs of this new world.

    And believe me, there is quite a lot to show him!

    He has been here for a while now, and I think he is finally beginning to adjust.

    We are all cheering for him, doing whatever we can to help.

    After all, imagine falling asleep as a billionaire and waking up in a world where nobody owns anything!

    Welcome to the New World, Benjamin!

    Oh, and one more thing.

    If you like, I can give you a guided tour as well.

    Just read Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, a book written about our world a hundred years ago.

    You can find it HERE.

    I’ll be waiting for you!

    — Aweena, 2115

  • The Real Purpose of AI

    The Real Purpose of AI

    We are racing to create an intelligence greater than our own.

    Companies are investing hundreds of billions. Nations are competing. Artificial intelligence is becoming more capable at extraordinary speed, and somewhere ahead lies the possibility of AGI — Artificial General Intelligence — and perhaps eventually something even more capable than that.

    There is enormous discussion about whether AI will be safe.

    There is enormous discussion about whether AI will take our jobs. It will.

    There is enormous discussion about who will develop the most powerful AI first.

    But there is a much simpler question that seems strangely absent.

    What is the real purpose of AI?

    The Race

    At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be one answer.

    Every company has its own purpose. Develop better products. Increase productivity. Reduce costs. Gain market share. Make money.

    Governments have other purposes. Increase national competitiveness. Improve administration. Strengthen national security.

    And inevitably, militaries are interested too.

    Meanwhile, humanity watches the race and wonders where it is taking us.

    Perhaps AI will cure diseases.

    Perhaps it will accelerate scientific discoveries.

    Perhaps it will solve problems we haven’t been able to solve ourselves.

    Perhaps it will replace enormous numbers of jobs.

    Perhaps it will create abundance beyond anything humanity has previously experienced.

    Perhaps it will become dangerous, break free and turn on us.

    Nobody really knows.

    And that is precisely the point.

    We are developing perhaps the most powerful technology humanity has ever created without first agreeing on what we ultimately want to accomplish with it.

    More and More

    The underlying purpose of automation has always seemed fairly obvious.

    Do more with less effort.

    The plough and bull replaced some human muscle. The tractor replaced much more. Industrial machinery transformed manufacturing. Computers automated calculations and administration. Robots entered factories.

    Each step allowed us to produce more, faster and with less human labor.

    AI continues that story, but with one enormous difference.

    We are no longer merely automating muscle.

    We are beginning to automate intelligence.

    Writing. Programming. Designing. Diagnosing. Planning. Researching. Organizing. Analyzing.

    And when artificial intelligence is combined with increasingly capable robotics, we could be approaching something humanity has never experienced before:

    an extreme abundance of labor.

    For almost all of human history, labor has been scarce.

    Now it may cease to be.

    Abundance

    Some technology leaders believe AI and robotics could eventually produce extraordinary material abundance.

    Perhaps they are right.

    But abundance alone doesn’t answer the important question.

    Who is the abundance for?

    If a company owns the AI, owns the robots, owns the factories and sells what those machines produce, we haven’t fundamentally changed the underlying system.

    We have simply created vastly more productive means within it.

    And that produces a peculiar contradiction.

    Suppose AI and robotics can produce more goods and services while requiring fewer human workers.

    That sounds like progress.

    But in our current monetary system, most people still need money to access those goods and services, and most people obtain that money through work.

    So the machines produce more.

    Humans need to work less.

    People lose jobs.

    People lose income.

    And suddenly they struggle to afford the extraordinary abundance the machines are producing. Unless the products cost less and less, which might be the result of this extreme productive abundance. But when the prices reach zero or close to zero, what is the point of money at all? And if money has no point, what about ownership and trading itself? To sell something requires that someone owns it first. Maybe it’s time we look closer on the whole ownership-trading-money paradigm…?

    Succeeding with AGI without addressing this question means we would have succeeded technologically while failing logically.

    Jobs

    This is why so much of the discussion about AI and employment sounds strangely confused.

    What are people going to do when AI takes their jobs?

    But perhaps we’re asking the question backwards.

    For thousands of years, we have invented machines precisely because we wanted to reduce human labor.

    Nobody invented the washing machine because washing clothes by hand was such a wonderful human experience that we wanted to preserve it.

    We automate work because automation can free human beings from having to do it.

    And now, having potentially created the ultimate automation technology, we are frightened that it might actually succeed.

    Why?

    Because we have connected two things that don’t necessarily have to remain connected:

    1. the production of what we need and 
    2. our right to access it.

    If you need a job to earn money, and you need money to live, then losing your job is terrifying.

    But that isn’t a problem created by abundance.

    It is a problem created by the system through which we distribute that abundance.

    The Question

    So perhaps the purpose of AI should not simply be:

    How can we produce more?

    How can we make companies more profitable?

    How can we increase sales?

    How can we make our nation more competitive?

    And certainly not:

    How can we build more powerful weapons?

    Perhaps we should ask something much bigger.

    How can this extraordinary intelligence help create the best possible life for humanity on the planet we share?

    That is a very different assignment.

    Imagine using AI to understand the Earth as one interconnected system.

    What resources do we have?

    What do people actually need and want?

    Where are the shortages?

    Where are the surpluses?

    What are we wasting?

    What can be reused?

    What can be recycled?

    How much food should we produce?

    Where should it go?

    How can housing, transportation, energy and infrastructure be provided using the least resources and causing the least ecological damage?

    Where are we exceeding planetary limits?

    How can we restore what we have damaged?

    Instead of asking AI to optimize sales, we could ask it to help us optimize life.

    Economy

    And perhaps something else happens here.

    We rediscover the true meaning of an old word.

    Economy.

    The word comes from the Greek oikonomia: the management of a household.

    That is a profoundly different idea from what we commonly mean today when we speak about “the economy.”

    Today we largely mean finance, markets, prices, employment, investment, debt, growth and monetary transactions.

    But none of those things are the household itself.

    The household is here.

    Earth.

    Its soil.

    Its oceans.

    Its forests.

    Its atmosphere.

    Its minerals.

    Its energy.

    Its ecosystems.

    And us.

    Economy=ecology.

    Perhaps AI could help us practice economy in its most fundamental sense for the first time on a planetary scale:

    the intelligent management of our shared home.

    Not to maximize financial return.

    Not to maximize consumption.

    But to meet human needs while maintaining the ecological foundations upon which every human life depends.

    Perhaps AI will not bring about the end of economy.

    Perhaps it will finally allow us to create one. A real one.

    Human purpose

    But then something fascinating happens.

    The question turns around.

    If AI can increasingly perform our labor, we don’t only have to ask:

    What is the purpose of AI?

    We suddenly have the freedom to ask:

    What is the purpose of humans?

    For centuries, much of human life has revolved around making ourselves useful to the monetary system.

    We educate ourselves so we can get jobs.

    We get jobs so we can earn money.

    We earn money so we can pay for somewhere to live, food to eat and everything else we need.

    “What do you do?” has become synonymous with:

    “What do you do for money?”

    But is that really the purpose of a human being?

    To spend decades toiling and working in order to obtain permission to live?

    Perhaps AI and robotics will finally allow us to separate work from purpose.

    That doesn’t mean humans stop doing things.

    Quite the opposite.

    We can create.

    Learn.

    Explore.

    Invent.

    Love.

    Raise children.

    Care for one another.

    Grow food.

    Make music.

    Dance.

    Play.

    Study the universe.

    Build communities.

    Restore forests.

    Explore and clean up oceans.

    Travel beyond Earth.

    And continue doing all kinds of work simply because we find that work meaningful.

    The difference is profound.

    We no longer have to justify our existence through our financial usefulness.

    Stewards

    Perhaps our role on Earth was never supposed to be that of workers serving a financial machine.

    Perhaps it is something much greater.

    Being stewards.

    We arrived on an extraordinary bountyful living planet that provides everything required for our existence.

    Air.

    Water.

    Food.

    Materials.

    Energy.

    Life itself.

    Perhaps our purpose is not to own as much of it as possible, extract as much value from it as possible and compete over the proceeds.

    Perhaps our purpose is to understand it, care for it and ensure that the extraordinary abundance it provides can sustain life far into the future. For generations to come.

    Artificial intelligence could help us do that.

    Not as our ruler or our master.

    But as perhaps the most extraordinary tool humanity has ever created.

    A tool capable of helping us understand enormously complex systems, coordinate resources, eliminate waste, automate unnecessary labor and manage our planetary household with an intelligence we have never possessed before.

    The Purpose

    We are understandably spending enormous effort asking how to make AI safe.

    We are asking what happens when AI takes our jobs.

    We are asking which company will win the race.

    We are asking which country will lead.

    But perhaps before racing much further, maybe we should have a much bigger conversation.

    Where are we racing to?

    We don’t have to know exactly what the future will look like.

    Nobody does.

    But we can decide what kind of future we would like to create.

    Perhaps the greatest question about artificial intelligence is not how intelligent it will become.

    It is what we will ask it to do.

    And perhaps the answer begins with another question entirely.

    If machines can eventually free us from spending our lives serving the system we created…

    what would we like to spend our lives serving instead?

    Perhaps the answer has been beneath our feet all along.

    Earth.

    Life.

    Each other.

    Imagine It

    What would such a world actually look like?

    A world where AI and automation no longer threaten our livelihoods, but liberate us from the need to work simply to survive. Where technology serves humanity, humanity becomes the steward of Earth, and abundance is shared rather than sold.

    That is the world explored in Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity.

    Because before we can create a different future, we first have to imagine one.

    Discover the story

  • For All the Reasons in the World

    For All the Reasons in the World

    Why would humanity abandon money, markets and ownership? There had better be some very good reasons.

    This blog is largely about a future based on a global resource-based economy: a non market system without money or trade, where the resources of the Earth are managed and shared for the benefit of humanity while protecting the living planet upon which we depend.

    That is quite a departure from the world we live in today.

    So why would we want to do it?

    For some, the answer might seem obvious.

    Like, duh! The monetary system? Look around! It’s running the planet—and humanity—into the ground!

    Climate change. Pollution. Poverty. War. Inequality. Environmental destruction. Debt. Stress. Homelessness. Overconsumption. Resource depletion.

    Take your pick.

    But let’s go deeper.

    Because I can already hear the objection.

    I like this system. I’m used to it.

    Money. Trading. Buying and selling. Ownership. It works. 

    These things are woven so deeply into our lives that they seem almost natural. And now you want the whole of humanity to abandon them?

    That’s a tall order.

    Besides, is there even enough for everyone? There are more than eight billion human beings on this planet. Surely we can’t all live abundant lives. Maybe the real problem is overpopulation. Maybe there are simply too many of us.

    And the system we have does work.

    At least for some.

    Hundreds of millions live comfortable lives. Some live in extraordinary abundance. 

    Born into poverty? 

    Tough luck. 

    Not my problem.

    Besides, even people born into poverty have become rich. Doesn’t that prove the opportunity is there? Work hard. Educate yourself. Start a company. Make smart investments. Climb the ladder.

    Maybe the system isn’t the problem.

    Maybe you just need to climb harder.

    Fine.

    Then let’s look at the system.

    Homelessness

    Start with something as basic as a home.

    There are millions of people sleeping on streets, in cars, under bridges and in temporary shelters while millions of homes stand empty. 

    Think about the physical reality of that for a moment.

    The homeless person exists.

    The empty home exists.

    The materials have already been extracted and the building  constructed. The roof is there. The walls are there. The plumbing is there. The electricity may already be connected.

    There is no physical shortage between that particular human being and that particular empty home.

    What is missing is permission to use it.

    Why?

    Because a home in our system is not merely a place for someone to live. It is property. An asset. An investment. Something that can be bought, sold, rented, inherited, mortgaged and held for financial gain.

    So we can simultaneously have:

    people without homes and homes without people.

    And somehow we have learned to see nothing particularly strange about this.

    The physical solution can be standing homeless across the street from the vacant home, while the economic system keeps them apart.

    That brings us to something much bigger.

    Artificial Scarcity

    Jacque Fresco was an American futurist and designer who founded The Venus Project and spent much of his life developing the idea of a resource-based economy.

    One of the experiences that shaped his thinking came during the Great Depression initiated by the stock market crash in 1929. He watched people struggle desperately to obtain food and other necessities.

    But something didn’t make sense.

    America hadn’t suddenly run out of everything. The farmland was still there. The shops were full. The factories were still there. The workers were still there. The knowledge was still there. Products could sit on shelves in stores while people outside couldn’t buy them.

    The resources existed.

    The need existed.

    What didn’t exist?

    Enough money in people’s pockets.

    That exposes an enormously important distinction.

    Real Scarcity

    There is real scarcity. If we have a thousand units of something and one million people need one, we have a genuine physical shortage. No economic system can magically change that.

    Artificial Scarcity

    But then there is artificial scarcity.

    Food exists, but you are hungry because you cannot afford it.

    A home exists, but you cannot live in it because you cannot afford it.

    Medicine exists, but you cannot obtain it because you cannot afford it.

    The problem isn’t necessarily that the thing doesn’t exist.

    The problem is that you don’t have enough purchasing power to access it.

    We have created scarcity where no physical scarcity necessarily exists.

    And we consider this normal.

    Poverty

    Now consider poverty itself.

    What does it actually mean to be poor?

    Does it mean there isn’t enough food on Earth for you? Not necessarily.

    Does it mean there aren’t enough clothes? Not necessarily.

    Does it mean humanity lacks the technology to provide clean water, electricity, communication, education or shelter? Not necessarily.

    It means you don’t have enough money to command access to those things.

    Abundance

    A person can stand surrounded by abundance and still be poor. Supermarkets can be full of food. Apartments can stand empty. Electricity can flow through wires. Information can travel instantly across the planet. Warehouses can overflow with products.

    And that person can have virtually no claim on any of it.

    Why?

    A number in an account.

    We call that number wealth.

    We call the absence of that number poverty.

    The physical world can be exactly the same in both cases.

    Inequality

    Meanwhile, somebody else can possess billions of those numbers.

    We often discuss inequality as though it were simply about envy.

    It isn’t.

    Money represents access. More money means greater access to land, housing, resources, transportation, healthcare, education, comfort, security and influence. Less money means less access. No money can mean almost no access at all.

    And yes, someone born poor can become rich.

    It happens.

    But that doesn’t answer the structural question.

    Can everybody become rich?

    What would rich even mean if everybody were rich?

    Rich only has meaning relative to someone having less.

    The system can absolutely produce winners.

    The question is whether a civilization should be designed around producing winners and losers in access to the resources everyone depends upon.

    Overconsumption

    Then we arrive at the other side of scarcity. Something politicians again and again urge us to not do.  Consume too much. But we have to consume, or else the system collapses. If we don’t buy enough everything stops.

    We don’t merely produce what people need. We need people to keep buying.

    Businesses require customers. Sales require demand. Investments require returns. Growth requires more economic activity by humans.

    So an enormous industry exists to persuade us that what we already have isn’t enough.

    A new phone. 

    A new car. 

    New clothes. 

    A new kitchen. 

    A new television. 

    A new model. 

    A new trend. 

    A new version.

    Buy. Replace. Upgrade. Discard. Pollute. Repeat.

    This isn’t a condemnation of people enjoying beautiful things. Design is wonderful. Variety is wonderful. New technology can genuinely improve our lives.

    But an economy dependent upon continuing sales has a built-in problem with the idea:

    That’s enough.

    Nature has limits.

    The market hates them.

    Waste

    The result is a remarkably wasteful cycle.

    We extract resources, manufacture products, package them, transport them, sell them, use them and discard them. 

    Then we extract more resources and begin again.

    Food gets thrown away while people are hungry. 

    Clothes are discarded. 

    Electronics are discarded. 

    Furniture is discarded. 

    Packaging exists for minutes and becomes waste for years. Perfectly usable things are replaced because a newer version has arrived.

    Consider product longevity.

    Imagine a washing machine designed to last 100 years, built from standardized components that can easily be repaired or replaced.

    Brilliant resource management.

    Terrible repeat business.

    A product that doesn’t need replacing doesn’t generate another sale.

    We have built an economy in which:

     Using fewer resources  conflicts directly with making more money.

    The Planet

    Now zoom out.

    Where does all this stuff come from?

    Earth.

    There is nowhere else.

    We drill into it, blast it, excavate it, pump it, cut it, mine it and burn it. And then we dump all the waste back unto it. We rip open enormous pits to extract minerals. We clear forests. We drill for oil and gas. We destroy habitats. We degrade soils. We remove resources from ecosystems faster than some can regenerate.

    And all of it becomes economic activity for the monetary system.

    A standing forest performs an extraordinary amount of useful work. It stores carbon, regulates water, protects soil, creates oxygen and habitat and supports biodiversity.

    Cut it down and sell it, however, and something magical happens.

    It becomes money. Numbers in a machine.

    The accounting system notices. GDP notices. The market notices.

    The forest?

    Gone.

    Overfishing

    The oceans provide an almost perfect example.

    Fish can reproduce in large numbers. Given healthy ecosystems and enough time, populations can replenish themselves.

    But fish also have prices.

    Boats cost money. Fuel costs money. Workers need incomes. Companies need revenue. Loans need servicing. Investors expect returns.

    Suddenly two calculations collide.

    The ecosystem asks:

    How much can be taken while allowing the population to recover?

    The economy asks:

    How much can be caught profitably?

    Those are not automatically the same answer.

    When they conflict, the fish don’t have lawyers.

    Pollution

    Then there is everything we dump back into the system.

    Carbon dioxide and other gas pollutants. Plastics. Chemicals. Wastewater. Mining waste. Industrial waste. Electronic waste.

    We extract concentrated resources from nature, turn them into products and eventually return much of the residue to nature in forms ecosystems cannot easily absorb.

    Then we create another industry to clean it up.

    First we make money creating the problem.

    Then we make money cleaning up the problem.

    Excellent for economic activity.

    Not quite as impressive for the planet.

    Human Health

    Eventually the damage comes back to us.

    We breathe the air. Drink the water. Eat the food. Live in the climate.

    Pollution damages human health. Environmental contamination exposes people to harmful substances. Climate change increases risks from extreme heat, fires and disruptions to food and water systems. And most of it is dumped on the poorest countries in the world. The countries who made most of the products in the first place. For pennies on the dollar.

    And then there is another form of damage that doesn’t come from a smokestack.

    Stress.

    Can I pay my rent? Can I pay the mortgage? Can I afford food? What happens if I lose my job? How will I pay my debt? Can I afford treatment? What happens when I retire? What if I get sick and can’t work?

    Millions upon millions of people carry these questions around every day.

    We call it life.

    Much of it isn’t life.

    It’s economics. Twisted life.

    Time and Work

    Then there is the extraordinary amount of our lives devoted to earning the right to continue living. Time spent chasing dollars instead of spending it with our loved ones and what we truly love doing.

    We spend years in education preparing for work. Then many of us spend decades selling a large part of our waking lives in exchange for the money required to obtain food, shelter and everything else. Paying back the mortgage that some bank created from nothing.

    Some people love their work. Many don’t. Some work is meaningful and necessary. Some exists largely because of the economic machinery surrounding everything else.

    For generations we have dreamed of machines taking over dangerous, exhausting and repetitive labor.

    And now they increasingly can.

    Which should be wonderful.

    Except in a monetary system, losing your work to a machine can mean losing your income. Losing your income can mean losing access to the things you need to live.

    So one of humanity’s greatest technological achievements becomes a threat.

    The machine can do your work! Fantastic! You’re fired! 

    We have created technology capable of freeing human beings from labor and an economic system capable of turning that freedom into poverty.

    And now something far bigger is arriving.

    Artificial Intelligence

    Artificial intelligence changes the equation completely.

    For centuries, technological change has replaced particular forms of human labor while creating others. The usual answer to automation has therefore been simple: people will find new jobs.

    But what happens as machines become capable not merely of replacing muscle, but increasingly of performing cognitive work as well?

    Writing. Coding. Translation. Administration. Analysis. Customer service. Design. Logistics. Accounting. Research. Driving. Planning. Diagnosis. Manufacturing.

    AI doesn’t need to replace every job for the problem to become enormous.

    It only needs to make significantly fewer human working hours necessary.

    And that creates a fundamental contradiction.

    Our technological objective is to make production more efficient—to produce more with less human labor.

    Our monetary system, however, still depends on people obtaining income, usually through work, so they can buy what is produced. Without enough people working and spending we will in effect not be able to have a monetary system like the current one. People is what sustains the economy. Not machines.

    Think about that.

    We are building machines specifically because they can do more of the work.

    Then we depend on humans doing enough work to earn the money required to buy what the machines produce.

    The better the machines become, the stranger the arrangement becomes.

    Of course governments can respond with redistribution, shorter working weeks, new forms of taxation, basic income and other mechanisms. Those could keep purchasing power circulating even if traditional employment falls. And much of that basic income would go directly back to the corporations that created the technology in the first place. An absurd loop.

    Notice what we would actually be doing.

    We would be desperately inventing ways of giving people enough money to access an abundance that increasingly requires less human labor to produce.

    Why?

    If AI and automation eventually allow us to produce food, housing, energy, transportation, manufactured goods and services with a fraction of today’s human labor, why should access to those things still depend upon having a job earning money at all?

    AI may therefore be more than another technological revolution.

    It may expose the fundamental absurdity of tying the right to live to the necessity of human labor. There are plenty of reasons for redesign, but AI might be the only one we actually need. Making it inevitable.

    The old fear was:

    How will we produce enough if people don’t work?

    The new question may become:

    Why should we have to work if we can already produce enough?

    That alone is reason enough to start questioning the system.

    Debt

    And then there is debt. On top of it all.

    At the end of 2025, global debt stood at approximately $348 trillion.

    $348,000,000,000,000.

    That’s more than three times the annual economic output of the entire planet.

    Governments owe money. Companies owe money. Households owe money. Individuals owe money.

    But stop looking at the numbers for a moment and look at the physical planet.

    Who exactly does Earth owe it to?

    Mars?

    Jupiter?

    The Andromeda Galaxy?

    Did humanity borrow iron from aliens? Did we take out a mortgage on the Pacific Ocean? Is the Sun charging us for daylight and energy?

    Of course not.

    These are financial claims that human beings and human institutions hold against one another. And the irony is that this debt constitutes most of our money supply and thus can’t be erased. Because then we would have no money to trade with.

    Yet these artificial numbers have become powerful enough to determine what happens in the physical world.

    They can determine whether somebody keeps their home, whether a hospital gets built, whether a company survives, whether workers lose their jobs, whether a government cuts services, whether resources are extracted, whether a forest is cut down, and whether we supposedly can or cannot “afford” to solve a problem.

    And here it gets even stranger.

    Most of the money we actually use isn’t created by governments printing banknotes. Commercial banks create a large share of it when they make loans. In fact, about 97% of our current money supply was created by private banks. Only 3% is “real money” in the form of coins and paper notes created by central banks.

    Take out a mortgage and the bank doesn’t normally take a pile of existing money from a vault and hand it to you. The loan creates a new bank deposit.

    New debt.

    New money.

    And when the principal of that bank loan is repaid, that deposit money is destroyed again.

    So debt isn’t merely something sitting on top of our monetary system.

    Debt creation is one of the principal ways the money itself comes into existence.

    And then comes interest.

    Borrow €100,000 and you don’t simply owe €100,000. You owe the principal plus interest.

    Scale that across mortgages, credit, corporate borrowing and government debt and we arrive at a civilization carrying hundreds of trillions of dollars in financial obligations while continually requiring future income to service them. And the money to pay the interest has never been created in the system. Thus, not only will almost all our money supply disappear if all debt is repaid, it is structurally impossible, since the money to repay the interest was never created. Well, it was created. As more debt. With more interest. The absurdity never ends.

    But that doesn’t technically mean every dollar of interest requires another dollar of new debt. Money circulates, banks spend income back into the economy, and money can enter and leave circulation through other mechanisms.

    But here is the trap.

    If bank borrowers collectively paid down their loans without those loans being replaced by new lending or other money creation, enormous quantities of bank-deposit money would disappear with them.

    Pay down the debt, and you also destroy most of the money supply created with it.

    We cannot simply remove the mountain of bank debt while assuming all the money created alongside it remains conveniently sitting there.

    The Physical World

    And all those financial obligations ultimately come back to the physical world.

    Loans must be serviced. Interest must be paid. Companies need revenue. Governments need revenue. People need incomes. Investors seek returns.

    So we produce, sell, consume, extract and grow.

    Again and again.

    As the mountain of financial obligations grows, so does the pressure to generate the economic activity required to service them.

    But economic activity doesn’t happen inside a spreadsheet.

    It happens here.

    On Earth. In the physical world.

    More mining. More energy. More production. More shipping. More products. More consumption. More waste. More pollution. More conflict. More war. More stress. More disease. More extraction to make the replacements.

    The financial claims can keep expanding.

    The physical planet cannot.

    And now the circle closes.

    Debt demands income. Income depends on economic activity. Economic activity requires production and consumption. Production requires resources. Consumption creates waste. Growth demands more production, which generates more economic activity, while new lending creates new debt and new money. With new interest on top.

    We are caught in a debt loop.

    Now look back at everything we have already discussed.

    Artificial scarcity. Poverty. Financial stress. Burnout. Overconsumption. Resource depletion. Pollution. Environmental destruction.

    They are not isolated phenomena floating around independently. They are connected to an economic system that continually requires money to be earned, debts to be serviced, returns to be generated and economic activity to continue.

    Somebody always has to get the money. And someone has to pay. In the end it is ourselves.

    Because ultimately, the bill is paid in something far more real than money: energy, materials, forests, minerals, soil, water, fish, human time, human health and the atmosphere. Our human habitat.

    We have created hundreds of trillions of dollars of financial claims against ourselves and then organized the physical world around satisfying them.

    Money can be created with entries in a banking system. Debt can acquire another trillion. Interest can compound. A financial account can gain another zero.

    But forests cannot compound indefinitely.

    Fish populations cannot be extracted indefinitely.

    Mineral deposits don’t expand because the financial system needs another year of growth.

    The atmosphere doesn’t negotiate with our debt obligations.

    Artificial numbers can grow indefinitely. The physical world cannot.

    So how do we escape the debt loop?

    Restructure the debt? Refinance it? Regulate it? Forgive some of it? Create more money? Create new debt to replace old debt? Keep the machine going for another generation?

    Or ask the question underneath all of it:

    Why do we need the maniac machine at all?

    Debt exists because we owe.

    We owe because things have prices.

    Things have prices because we trade them.

    And we trade them because we have divided the resources of one planet into things somebody owns and somebody else must pay for.

    Debt isn’t the bottom of the rabbit hole.

    Money isn’t even the bottom.

    Underneath money sits trading.

    And underneath trading sits ownership.

    Mine. Yours. I own. You don’t. You pay me.

    Ideas so deeply embedded in civilization that questioning them sounds insane.

    But Maybe continuing them is the true insanity.

    War

    And then we arrive at the masterpiece.

    War.

    Wars have many causes: territory, nationalism, ideology, religion, security, political power and empire. But control over resources and economically valuable territory has repeatedly played a big role.

    Land. Oil. Minerals. Water. Ports. Trade routes. Intellectual property.

    One group wants control. Another group wants control.

    So we extract enormous quantities of resources, use immense amounts of energy, employ some of our most brilliant scientists and engineers and build aircraft, missiles, ships, tanks, bombs and weapons.

    Then we use them to destroy resources.

    Homes. Hospitals. Factories. Roads. Bridges. Power stations. Water systems. Farms. Nature. Human beings.

    Then, when we finally stop destroying everything, we rebuild it.

    More materials. More energy. More extraction. More work. More money.

    If an alien civilization were watching, this might be the point where they quietly locked their doors and left this planet.

    Look Again

    Now look at what we have assembled.

    Homelessness. Artificial scarcity. Poverty. Inequality. Overconsumption. Waste. Resource depletion. Deforestation. Overfishing. Pollution. Climate change. Disease. Stress. Burnout. Fear of unemployment, war, conflict and crime. Automation becoming a threat. AI potentially undermining the whole monetary system itself. Debt. War.

    Are all these things caused exclusively by money?

    No.

    Human beings are perfectly capable of stupidity without it.

    But look at what keeps appearing.

    Purchasing power. Prices. Profit. Ownership. Debt. Interest. Competition. Income. Return on investment. Economic growth. Money.

    The monetary system isn’t some innocent measuring device sitting beside civilization.

    It is almost civilization itself. Although, I wouldn’t call it civilized.

    It determines access.

    It rewards certain activities and punishes others. It tells us what is “economically viable.” It turns resources into assets, homes into investments, forests into timber, fish into revenue, human time into labor costs and destruction into economic gain.

    Then, when the consequences become unbearable, we turn back to the same system and ask:

    How much will it cost to fix them?

    Pollution? Put a price on it.

    Poverty? Find the money.

    Climate change? Calculate the investment.

    Destroyed ecosystems? Give nature a monetary value.

    Debt crisis? Find more financing.

    Mass automation? Find some way to give people enough money to keep buying things.

    We keep trying to solve monetary problems through monetary thinking.

    Maybe the problem goes deeper.

    Maybe money, trading and ownership themselves have reached the end of their usefulness.

    We invented them.

    But they aren’t gravity.

    They aren’t photosynthesis.

    They aren’t laws of nature.

    They are concepts.

    And concepts can be abandoned.

    The Real Economy

    Strip away the numbers.

    What actually keeps us alive?

    Food. Water. Energy. Land. Materials. Housing. Infrastructure. Knowledge. Technology. Healthy ecosystems. Joyful thriving human beings.

    That is the real economy.

    Not dollars.

    Not euros.

    Not GDP.

    Not stock prices.

    Not bank balances.

    Not $348 trillion of IOUs humanity has written to itself.

    So perhaps the question we constantly ask is the wrong one.

    How can we afford it?

    Can we afford to house everyone? Can we afford to feed everyone? Can we afford clean energy? Can we afford to restore ecosystems? Can we afford healthcare? Can we afford to stop destroying the climate?

    Wrong question.

    Here’s the right question:

    Do we have the resources?

    Do we have the food, energy, materials, land, productive capacity, knowledge and technology?

    And can we provide what we need without destroying the ecosystems upon which we depend?

    Those are physical questions.

    If the answer is no, we have a real problem. Use fewer resources. Find alternatives. Develop better technology. Recycle. Prioritize. Solve the actual shortage.

    But the truth is, we already produce way more than enough food and products to provide for the whole of humanity and then some. So, we have enough. We only need to do everything better. We don’t need infinite resources.

    We need to become intelligent about the resources we already have.

    We invented the obstacle.

    Money isn’t food.

    Money isn’t housing.

    Money isn’t energy.

    Money isn’t medicine.

    Money isn’t a forest.

    Money isn’t a fish.

    You cannot eat it, drink it or breathe it. Or build anything with it.

    And Earth has absolutely no idea it exists.

    True Freedom

    So now we can finally return to the beginning.

    Why would humanity contemplate something as radical as a global resource-based economy without money, trading or ownership?

    For all the reasons we have just looked at.

    Maybe the answer isn’t to redesign the debt.

    Maybe it isn’t to distribute money a little differently.

    Maybe it isn’t to invent greener financial products.

    Maybe it isn’t to tax robots so humans can continue buying what robots produce.

    Maybe it isn’t to make destruction slightly less profitable.

    Maybe it is time to stop organizing civilization around financial claims altogether.

    No money. No debt.

    Not because $348 trillion has somehow been magically repaid.

    But because the accounting system that created the debt is no longer needed.

    And notice what happens.

    The houses don’t disappear. The farmland doesn’t disappear. The factories don’t disappear. The solar panels don’t disappear. The trains don’t disappear. The hospitals don’t disappear. The technology doesn’t disappear. The knowledge doesn’t disappear.

    The resources don’t disappear.

    Only the price tags do.

    Instead of managing money, manage the things that actually exist.

    Resources.

    Instead of producing what can be sold, produce what is needed.

    Instead of asking whether protecting nature is profitable, make ecological sustainability a physical requirement. A given. Not something we have to afford.

    Instead of designing products around repeat sales, design them for durability, repairability and efficient use of resources.

    Instead of fearing AI and automation because they take away jobs, let them take away work.

    That was supposed to be the point.

    If a machine can perform a dangerous, repetitive or tedious task better than a human being, fantastic. Let it.

    Nobody loses their food.

    Nobody loses their home.

    Nobody loses healthcare.

    Nobody suddenly becomes worthless because a machine can perform a task they used to perform.

    Technology finally becomes what technology should be:

    liberation.

    And instead of competing for ownership of the planet, we become its stewards.

    When something really is scarce, don’t hide the scarcity behind a price and hand it to whoever has the biggest bank account.

    Measure it. Manage it. Prioritize it. Find alternatives. Use less.

    Solve the actual problem.

    The guiding question becomes almost embarrassingly simple:

    What do we need, what do we have, and how do we provide it sustainably to those who need it?

    The profit motive gives way to the need motive.

    We know what we need.

    That is the motive to provide it.

    And this leads to a completely different definition of freedom.

    Actual freedom

    Today we call ourselves free if we are allowed to compete for enough money to live. We are free to work, borrow, invest and become rich. We are also free to become poor, lose our homes, spend decades servicing debt and worry whether next month’s paycheck will cover next month’s bills. Is this actual freedom?

    Or is actual freedom something completely different?

    Freedom from poverty.

    Freedom from artificial scarcity.

    Freedom from monetary debt.

    Freedom from compulsory economic competition.

    Freedom from spending most of our lives earning permission to live.

    And freedom for humanity to finally use AI, automation, science, technology and the resources of this extraordinary planet for what they should have been used for all along:

    Taking care of everyone and the planet that keeps us alive.

    No more debt.

    No money.

    No trading away our planet.

    No ownership of the Earth itself.

    Stewardship.

    Access.

    Abundance where abundance is physically possible.

    Responsible management where it isn’t.

    True freedom for all.

    Ok, I hear you say, I’m convinced. But how do we get from here to there?

    Imagination

    Through imagination. Through showing the world the possibility.

    Money, trading and ownership have been with us for so long that imagining a world without them can seem almost impossible.

    But every new human reality begins as an idea.

    That is why I wrote Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity.

    The bewildered billionaire Benjamin Michaels wakes up in 2115 to a world without money, trade or ownership—a world where humanity manages Earth’s resources together and technology has finally become a means of liberation rather than yet more competition.

    It isn’t a prediction.

    It’s a possibility.

    Because before we can create a different world, we first have to imagine it.

    And  that’s exactly what humanity did, ending up in the new world Benjamin wakes up in. We finally managed to replace the old expired monetary system and replaced it with a global resource based economy that takes care of every human being and the planet itself.

    Discover the story 

    And if this article resonates, feel free to share it, because that is how we change the world. From one person to another, imagining something completely different…

  • How to Live on Earth

    How to Live on Earth

    Benedict Cumberbatch has a new documentary out called How to Live on Earth. It’s freely available on Youtube and It opens with a wonderfully simple observation:

    Some people have suggested that if things don’t work out here on Earth, we could live on Mars.

    But Mars is horrible. 

    There’s no water, no atmosphere, no plants and no animals. 

    Not habitable, in other words.

    Why would anyone want to live on Mars?

    Here’s another idea:

    How about we first figure out: 

    how to live on Earth?

    Welcome to Earth’s greatest how-to video.

    Something we have apparently only just discovered we need; A how-to video for Earth. There are how-to videos for everything. Finally we have one for Earth itself. I love that, even though I don’t agree with all the conclusions it makes.

    The documentary is beautifully made with crisp colorful images from all over the world showing both the beauty and the environmental destruction that exists on our planet interspersed with interviews of natives, locals and experts.

    Because after thousands of years of civilization, after splitting the atom, walking on the Moon, mapping the human genome and creating artificial intelligence, there is one rather fundamental thing Homo sapiens still hasn’t mastered:

    How to live on and properly take care of  the main planet we have.

    And How to Live on Earth sets out to find some answers.

    Not by dreaming about another planet, but by looking more carefully at this one.

    It asks three deceptively simple questions:

    How do we value nature?

    How do we feed the future?

    How do we feel human?

    They sound like separate questions.

    By the end, they don’t feel separate at all.

    How to Value Nature

    We have developed a rather peculiar way of valuing the world around us.

    A forest standing peacefully may have relatively little monetary value to whoever owns it.

    Cut it down and suddenly there is timber to sell.

    A mountain may remain untouched for millions of years. Discover something valuable beneath it, tear it apart and financial economic value is created.

    Fish swimming in an ocean contribute relatively little to our economy.

    Catch them, process them, package them and sell them and suddenly they do.

    For centuries we have become extraordinarily good at assigning monetary value to what we can extract from nature.

    But what about what nature does simply by remaining alive?

    A forest stores carbon, regulates water and provides habitat.

    Wetlands absorb water and reduce flooding.

    Healthy soil retains moisture, cycles nutrients and grows food.

    Insects pollinate plants.

    Countless organisms maintain ecosystems upon which human civilization ultimately depends.

    All of this has value.

    Enormous value.

    True value.

    But how much is it worth?

    That question will become important later.

    How to Feed the Future

    The documentary then turns to something even more fundamental.

    Food.

    How do we feed billions of human beings without progressively destroying the systems that produce that food?

    Industrial agriculture has given humanity extraordinary productive capacity, but monocultures, soil degradation, habitat destruction and resource-intensive food production have also imposed enormous costs on the living world. The film continues with showing how they in China have started to manually pollinate pear trees because the bees that used to do the job for free has disappeared. It’s very time consuming and costly.

    Onwards, the film explores regenerative farming, changing what we eat, reducing our dependence on resource-intensive meat production and developing alternatives such as proteins made from mycelium, insects and the sun itself.

    But one of the examples that stayed with me most comes from Sumatra.

    There, children are learning how to create biodiversity directly.

    Instead of treating agriculture as a battle in which nature must be cleared away so that a single monocrop can dominate, they are learning to create permaculture gardens and food forests.

    Many species grow together.

    Humans can eat from them.

    Wildlife can eat from them.

    Villagers can harvest a much wider variety of useful products than they could from a monoculture.

    And orangutans are returning.

    There is something wonderfully simple about this.

    Nobody needs to choose between feeding human beings and protecting nature.

    The objective becomes allowing both to thrive.

    The villagers can, of course, sell what they harvest. They still live inside a monetary society and need incomes like everyone else.

    Nothing wrong with that.

    But money isn’t what makes the food forest work.

    Soil does.

    Water does.

    Plants do.

    Insects do.

    People do.

    Orangutans do.

    Life does.

    And perhaps those children are learning something much more important than agriculture.

    They are learning how to live on Earth.

    How to Feel Human

    Then comes perhaps the most beautiful of the documentary’s three questions.

    How do we feel human?

    The answer leads us back to nature again.

    Trees in cities.

    Gardens.

    Parks.

    Green buildings.

    Places where people can walk, sit, play and breathe among other living things.

    We increasingly discover that contact with nature matters deeply to human well-being.

    Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.

    For almost our entire evolutionary history, nature wasn’t something we visited.

    It was home.

    We didn’t evolve next to nature.

    We evolved inside it.

    Our bodies are made from the same elements as everything around us.

    We breathe oxygen produced by living systems.

    We drink water circulating through the planet.

    Everything we eat ultimately comes from the Earth.

    We did not arrive here from somewhere else.

    We are nature.

    Which brings us back to that first question.

    How do we value it?

    Bankable Nature

    One of the documentary’s answers is ingenious and clever.

    If our economic system makes destroying nature profitable, perhaps we can reverse the incentive.

    The proposed mechanism is called a Natural Asset Company, or NAC. An ecosystem—such as a forest, wetland or other natural area—is placed under the stewardship of a company. The ecological services it provides are given an estimated monetary value, shares in the company can then be sold to investors, and the capital raised is used to protect and restore the ecosystem.

    In other words, the idea is to make nature itself an investable asset.

    Make preserving nature profitable.

    Nature performs an almost unimaginable amount of useful work.

    Forests store carbon. Wetlands control water. Soil produces food. Ecosystems maintain biodiversity.

    Economists can attempt to calculate the monetary value of these services.

    And from this comes the idea of the Natural Asset Company, or NAC.

    Large areas of natural value can be represented through companies.

    Shares can be issued.

    Investors can put money into those companies.

    Capital can flow toward protecting and restoring ecosystems instead of destroying them.

    In effect:

    If greed helped destroy nature, perhaps greed can be harnessed to save it.

    I understand the idea.

    It may even sound glorious on paper.

    Changing Our Mindset

    But the more I thought about it, the more something bothered me.

    We haven’t actually changed the way we think.

    We have found another way of monetizing nature.

    ROI

    Investors expect something.

    ROI.

    Return on Investment.

    You put money into something because eventually you expect more money back.

    Some Natural Asset Companies could generate some conventional income. Ecotourism perhaps. Sustainable agricultural products. Carbon credits. Biodiversity credits. Payments for ecosystem services.

    But much of the supposed monetary value of an ecosystem isn’t actually being sold.

    A wetland may perform immensely valuable ecological functions while generating very little cash.

    So we attempt to calculate what those functions are worth.

    We translate them into economic value.

    Economic value becomes share capital.

    Investors buy shares.

    And if those shares appreciate, they may eventually be sold to another investor for more money.

    Look at what has happened.

    Nature → estimated economic value → financial asset → shares → money.

    Nature has been financialized.

    Again.

    The method has changed.

    The mindset hasn’t.

    The Universal Asset Fund

    Perhaps we should take the idea to its logical conclusion.

    How much is the universe worth?

    A quadrillion dollars?

    A quintillion?

    Let’s calculate it.

    The Sun must be extraordinarily valuable. Without it, virtually every ecosystem on Earth collapses.

    The Moon provides useful tidal services.

    The atmosphere provides oxygen.

    Gravity performs an invaluable service by preventing us from floating into space.

    So let’s calculate the combined monetary value of everything and establish the Universal Asset Fund — UAF.

    You can buy shares.

    The money raised will be distributed to the Earth, Moon and Sun so they can continue operating and producing value for the fund.

    Naturally, we will need performance targets.

    The Sun should continue producing approximately the agreed amount of sunlight.

    The Moon will remain responsible for tidal services.

    Earth should maintain acceptable atmospheric conditions.

    And the universe will be expected to maintain existence.

    If everything performs well, the intrinsic value of the Universal Asset Fund should increase.

    Your shares may appreciate.

    You can then sell them to another investor, realize your return in dollars, euros or yen and buy yourself a new car.

    Or perhaps a robot.

    Ridiculous?

    Of course.

    The universe doesn’t need a fund.

    Neither does the Sun.

    Neither does oxygen.

    And nature doesn’t need a stock price before it becomes valuable.

    What Is Oxygen Worth?

    Seriously.

    How much is oxygen worth?

    Ten trillion dollars?

    A hundred trillion?

    A quadrillion?

    Pick a number.

    Nothing about oxygen changes.

    Take oxygen away, however, and something rather interesting happens.

    Money becomes irrelevant.

    The banks can remain open.

    The stock markets can continue displaying numbers.

    Every billionaire can retain every dollar in every account.

    It won’t matter.

    Because the civilization using the money will disappear.

    And perhaps this reveals the fundamental mistake.

    Money may be extraordinarily powerful inside the human system we created.

    But it is completely irrelevant to the physical processes upon which that system depends.

    The forest doesn’t care about dollars.

    Soil doesn’t respond to stock prices.

    Orangutans don’t reproduce because biodiversity credits appreciate.

    Rain doesn’t fall because somebody calculated its economic value.

    Nature operates in physical reality.

    So do we.

    The Monetary Mindset

    Money began as a tool.

    But over thousands of years it became something much larger.

    It became a way of seeing.

    What can I own?

    What can I sell?

    What can I extract?

    What is my return?

    What is it worth?

    A forest became timber.

    Land became real estate.

    Minerals became commodities.

    Fish became catch.

    Oil became reserves.

    Nature became assets.

    And enormous advantages accumulated to those who controlled those assets.

    This way of thinking has helped transform the planet.

    Now we are confronting the consequences.

    Forests disappearing.

    Habitats fragmented.

    Species vanishing.

    Oceans depleted.

    Soils deteriorating.

    A destabilizing climate.

    And one proposed answer is to extend the same language even further.

    Natural capital.

    Natural assets.

    Financial valuation.

    Investment.

    Shares.

    ROI.

    Maybe we should ask whether this is really the transformation we need.

    Finding new ways of monetizing nature is not the way to save nature.

    Perhaps the deeper task is to stop looking at nature through money.

    Think Like an Elephant 

    An elephant doesn’t know what money is.

    Neither does a newborn baby.

    Neither understands investment, interest, ownership, assets or financial returns.

    But both understand what actually matters.

    Food.

    Air.

    Water.

    Warmth.

    Safety.

    Relationship.

    An elephant doesn’t know the market value of a watering hole.

    It knows thirst.

    A baby doesn’t know the price of milk.

    It knows hunger.

    A child doesn’t need a financial incentive to play.

    And perhaps there is wisdom in that simplicity.

    What if instead of teaching ourselves increasingly sophisticated ways of putting prices on the world, we trained ourselves to experience its real value again?

    Take off your shoes.

    Walk through the grass.

    Eat a tomato.

    Watch an elephant.

    Listen to birds returning to a forest.

    Feel sunlight on your face.

    None of these things requires a financial valuation.

    They require something much simpler:

    Attention.

    Pay Attention

    We say pay attention. Maybe that is our true currency? Attention. And what we pay attention to is what we get more of. Pay attention to money and money may increase. Pay attention to the natural world around us and our joy of being in it may increase. The beauty of attention is that it is not a currency we rely on a central bank to create. We all have it within us already. We just need to use it. And the more we use it, the more we can create for everyone. Because it doesn’t run out. We control it through our choices. Choose to pay attention to whatever you like, and that will grow in your world. 

    Calculation in Kind

    Abandoning monetary thinking doesn’t mean abandoning calculation.

    Quite the opposite.

    We need to calculate what actually matters.

    How much food can this land sustainably produce?

    How many people can it feed?

    How much water is available?

    How much energy do we need?

    How much renewable energy can we produce?

    How healthy is the soil?

    How much material do we have?

    How much carbon is the forest absorbing?

    Which species are returning?

    What does an ecosystem need in order to regenerate?

    What do human beings actually need to live good lives?

    Tonnes.

    Litres.

    Kilowatt-hours.

    Hectares.

    Calories.

    Nutrients.

    Materials.

    Energy.

    Time.

    Those are physical realities.

    We can calculate them directly.

    We don’t eat money.

    We eat food.

    We don’t drink economic value.

    We drink water.

    We don’t breathe GDP.

    We breathe air.

    Perhaps the greatest how-to video on Earth has been pointing toward something remarkably simple all along:

    Pay attention to what actually matters.

    True Value

    And then there is value that cannot meaningfully be calculated at all.

    The joy of eating those vegetables.

    The pleasure of walking barefoot in the grass.

    Watching an orangutan swing through a restored forest.

    Swimming in a clean river.

    Hearing birds in the morning.

    Playing with your children.

    Making something.

    Loving someone.

    Being alive.

    How much is any of that worth?

    The question itself becomes ridiculous.

    Perhaps some things aren’t priceless because we haven’t yet developed sophisticated enough economic models to calculate their correct price.

    Perhaps they’re priceless because price has nothing to do with their value.

    Four Chapters

    Near the end of the documentary, Cumberbatch takes an enormous step backwards and looks at the whole story of Earth.

    He describes it in four chapters.

    Chapter One

    Earth before life.

    Chapter Two

    Life appears and evolves into the extraordinary living world around us.

    Chapter Three

    Intelligent life appears.

    That intelligence becomes incredibly powerful.

    It develops agriculture, cities, industry, science and technology. Eventually it becomes capable of transforming the entire planet.

    Unfortunately, it also becomes capable of threatening the living systems upon which it depends.

    That is where we are now.

    Chapter Four

    A time when intelligent life finally learns how to become a positive force on its planet.

    I love that idea.

    But it leaves us with one final question.

    What would make us a positive force?

    More cleverness?

    Or true wisdom?

    The Wise Human

    Homo sapiens is usually translated as wise human.

    We have demonstrated intelligence beyond question.

    But perhaps wisdom looks different.

    Maybe Chapter Four doesn’t begin when we finally calculate the correct monetary value of every forest, river, wetland and species on Earth.

    Maybe it begins when we understand that they never needed a monetary value in the first place.

    Maybe it begins when a child in Sumatra learns to grow food in a way that also gives an orangutan somewhere to live.

    When we measure what needs measuring.

    Food.

    Water.

    Energy.

    Resources.

    Ecological health.

    Human needs.

    And stop trying to measure what cannot meaningfully be measured.

    Wonder.

    Beauty.

    Love.

    Belonging.

    Joy.

    Life.

    Perhaps the transition from Chapter Three to Chapter Four is ultimately a transition from price to true value.

    From extraction to regeneration.

    From ownership to relationship and stewardship.

    From financial accumulation to abundance of life.

    From asking:

    What can I get from this?

    to asking:

    How can all of this thrive?

    How to Live on Earth

    And so we arrive back where Cumberbatch started.

    How do we live on Earth?

    Perhaps we have made the answer far more complicated than it needs to be.

    Understand what we actually need.

    Understand what the Earth can sustainably provide.

    Use our extraordinary science and technology to bring those two things together.

    Feed everyone.

    House everyone.

    Restore forests.

    Regenerate soils.

    Protect oceans.

    Bring wildlife back.

    Create beautiful places to live.

    Reduce the amount of unnecessary work human beings have to do.

    And leave enough space for the rest of life to flourish too.

    Then stop trying to put a price on everything, and simply enjoy what no balance sheet could ever measure:

    Joy and love.

    Enjoy it.

    Eat the food.

    Swim in the sea.

    Watch the orangutans.

    Love someone.

    Make something.

    Take off your shoes.

    Feel the grass.

    Look around.
    This is home.
    Perhaps that is Chapter Four.
    Perhaps that is what Homo sapiens was supposed to mean all along.

    And what might Chapter Four actually look like?

    That is the world  explored in Waking Up— A journey towards a new dawn for humanity. A future seen through the eyes of Benjamin Michaels, a bewildered billionaire from our time who wakes up a century later to discover that humanity has finally learned how to live on Earth.

    Not perfectly. Not without challenges of course. But without money, without ownership of the Earth’s resources, and without the need to turn nature into a financial asset before deciding it is worth anything.

    Perhaps the future begins with something as simple as imagining it as a drastically different world from today?

  • The Wild Return

    The Wild Return

    “A plant-based diet could save up to 8 billion tonnes of CO₂ a year.”

    — Greta Thunberg

    She is right.

    A worldwide transition towards plant-based food could produce an enormous reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions. It would also free vast areas of the Earth. 

    Land now used for livestock.

    Livestock currently occupies approximately 77 percent of all global agricultural land, including grazing land and cropland used to grow animal feed. Yet meat and dairy provide only around 18 percent of humanity’s calories and 37 percent of its protein.

    More than three-quarters of our agricultural land is therefore used to produce less than one-fifth of our food energy.

    Moving towards plant-based food would allow immense areas of forest, wetland and grassland to return. Wildlife habitats could reconnect. Billions of animals would no longer be bred inside an industrial production system.

    That alone could begin transforming the planet.

    But animal agriculture is not the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions.

    Fossil fuels are.

    The Larger Question

    Humanity currently releases close to 37 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide every year through fossil fuels and cement production.

    What if we reduced our emissions from coal, oil and gas not by ten or twenty percent, but all the way to zero? Not burning them at all.

    What kind of world would that give us?

    Exhaust Fumes

    It would give us a world no longer heating the atmosphere by continuously burning fossilized life from beneath the ground. A world where cities were no longer covered in exhaust fumes, oceans were no longer forced to absorb an ever-growing quantity of carbon dioxide and global temperatures were no longer driven relentlessly upwards by human industry.

    Stopping fossil-fuel burning would prevent more than four times as much carbon dioxide as the worldwide transition towards plant-based food.

    Doing both would change everything.

    Decades of Promises

    Yet despite decades of climate conferences, promises, targets and technological progress, global fossil-fuel emissions remain near record levels.

    The problem is not that humanity lacks alternatives. The problem is that our monetary system cannot stop.

    The Money Trap

    A complete end to fossil-fuel burning is impossible within a monetary system that depends upon continuous production, consumption and economic growth.

    Oil companies cannot voluntarily stop selling oil while remaining oil companies. Coal companies cannot leave coal underground when extracting it is the source of their income. Airlines, shipping companies, car manufacturers, construction companies and industrial producers cannot simply reduce their activities to what humanity genuinely needs.

    They must earn money, repay debts, protect investments and compete for market share.

    Even renewable energy is introduced into this growth machinery. Instead of clean energy replacing fossil energy, it is often added to an expanding total energy supply because the economy must continue growing. Thus, the so-called green energy revolution also adds to the economic activity that continues to destroy life on this planet.

    When production becomes cheaper and more efficient, companies rarely decide to produce less. They produce more. When products last longer, fewer replacements can be sold, so durability becomes a threat to profit. When consumption declines, people lose their jobs and governments fear recession.

    Waste is not merely a mistake within this structure. 

    Waste keeps money circulating.

    The monetary system cannot calmly decide that humanity has produced enough. Enough means contraction, unemployment, unpaid debt, falling profits and economic crisis. An outlook to a life no one wants.

    Yet enough is exactly what the living planet requires.

    A River Warning

    The consequences are no longer distant or abstract.

    Swedish Radio recently reported that drought and exceptionally low water flows are threatening sea trout and freshwater pearl mussels in southern Sweden.

    For the sea trout, the situation is critical. This is the time when they should begin migrating from the sea into rivers and streams to spawn. In several smaller waterways in Skåne, water levels are now so low that they may be unable to make the journey.

    The freshwater pearl mussel is threatened as well. Its survival is closely connected to trout and salmon because its larvae spend part of their development attached to the gills of these fish. When the fish disappear, the mussel’s reproductive cycle is broken too.

    One species does not simply vanish alone.

    The trout, the mussel, the insects, the flowing water, the riverbed and the surrounding vegetation belong to one living system. Damage one part severely enough and the effects travel through everything else.

    This is how ecological collapse often appears. Not as one spectacular global event, but as thousands of local relationships quietly breaking apart.

    A stream becomes too shallow. A fish cannot reach its spawning ground. A mussel cannot reproduce. Another thread is pulled from the web.

    Emptying Oceans

    The same destruction is happening beneath the surface of the oceans.

    The seas have been treated as industrial resources from which the largest possible quantity must be extracted and sold. Enormous fishing fleets criss cross the planet searching for the remaining concentrations of profitable fish. Bottom trawlers scrape across seabeds. Unwanted fish, marine mammals, turtles and seabirds are caught and discarded as bycatch.

    When fish populations decline, the monetary system does not automatically stop. Scarcity can increase the value of what remains, creating an incentive to continue hunting a species precisely when it most needs protection. Regulations may be in place to prevent this, but are they strong enough to withstand the economic pressure to keep fishing?

    At the same time, fossil-fuel emissions are heating and acidifying the oceans. Agricultural chemicals and industrial pollution flow through rivers into coastal waters. Plastic breaks apart into microscopic particles that travel throughout marine food webs.

    We are attacking marine life from every direction and then expressing surprise when fish stocks collapse.

    But the oceans are not dead. Their capacity for recovery is extraordinary when the pressure is removed.

    The same is true on land.

    Beyond Money

    The conclusion should now be obvious. It is the relentless pressure of the monetary system itself that drives us to overfish, over extract, overproduce, over consume and pollute. We cannot solve this crisis within the same system that makes continued destruction an economic necessity. Thus, if we truly want to preserve nature and our life on this planet, and live in peace instead of starting to fight with each other to secure the last of dwindling resources, we cannot continue with the monetary system. But we could continue with a resource based economy.

    A global resource-based economy would begin with a completely different question.

    Instead of asking what can be sold profitably, it would ask what people and ecosystems actually need.

    Direct Access

    Humanity could assess its available energy, land, water, minerals, forests and productive capacity directly. Artificial intelligence and global information systems could help coordinate those resources without prices, trade or financial competition determining every decision.

    We could then plan the end of fossil-fuel use as a needed physical transition.

    Renewable-energy systems could be produced where they were most effective. Buildings could be insulated as passive houses. Transportation could be electrified. Products could be designed to last, remain repairable and use standardized components. Unnecessary duplication could be eliminated, and materials could circulate through society instead of repeatedly becoming waste.

    We would reduce emissions in two ways: 

    1. We would replace fossil energy with non-polluting energy
    1. we would stop wasting energy on production serving no genuine human purpose.

    A resource-based economy would not require less knowledge, comfort or creativity. It would require far less extraction, pollution and unnecessary physical production.

    We could live better while restoring the Earth.

    Returning Land

    A predominantly plant-based food system would release immense areas now used for grazing livestock and producing animal feed.

    Fences could be removed. Wildlife corridors could reconnect fragmented habitats. Forests could spread across former grazing land. Wetlands could be restored. Rivers could flow through regenerated landscapes, protected by vegetation that retained water, stabilized soil and sheltered aquatic life.

    Then the animals would return.

    Bison could again move across open landscapes. Deer, elk, antelope and wild horses could expand into restored territories. Elephants could regain ancient migration routes. Wolves, bears and large cats could return where human expansion had driven them away.

    Birds would return with the forests and wetlands. Insects would return as chemical use declined and diverse vegetation replaced industrial monocultures.

    We would stop breeding a few domesticated species by the billion and begin welcoming thousands of wild species back into the world.

    That would be true animal abundance.

    Returning Waters

    Rivers would recover as well.

    Wetlands, forests and healthy soils absorb water when rain falls and release it gradually during dry periods. Restoring them would not prevent every drought, but it would make entire landscapes better able to retain water and withstand extremes.

    Dams and other unnecessary barriers could be removed where appropriate. Pollution could be stopped at its source. Rivers could again connect mountains, forests, farms, wetlands and seas.

    Sea trout could reach their spawning grounds. Salmon could return to rivers from which they had disappeared. Freshwater pearl mussels could reproduce again. Fish would carry marine nutrients upstream, feeding birds, mammals, insects, plants and soil organisms.

    The river would no longer be managed merely as water for agriculture, industry or sale. It would be understood as a living system.

    Returning Oceans

    The restoration would continue beyond the river mouth.

    A resource-based economy would have no reason to empty the oceans. There would be no fishing corporations required to increase catches, no international fleets pursuing the last profitable shoals and no market turning rarity into a higher price.

    Industrial fishing would end. Spawning grounds would be protected. Bottom trawling would stop. Large marine areas could be left undisturbed while damaged ecosystems recovered.

    Mangroves, seagrass meadows, salt marshes, coral reefs and coastal wetlands would be restored. These environments are nurseries for marine life as well as protections against storms, erosion and rising seas.

    Fish can reproduce in extraordinary numbers when they are given clean water, intact habitats and enough time. As populations recovered inside protected areas, they would spread into surrounding waters. Large fish would return. Whales, dolphins, seals, seabirds and countless other species would follow the renewed abundance of food.

    The oceans could again become almost unimaginable in their richness.

    Humans could still fish. But we would take only what populations could continuously regenerate. Fishing would become a relationship with a living ecosystem rather than an industry mining the sea.

    The sea would no longer be filled with swimming commodities.

    It would be alive again.

    Living Homesteads

    Ending industrial animal production would not mean removing every domesticated animal from human life.

    A few chickens, ducks, goats or sheep could live on homesteads and permaculture farms. Chickens could eat insects and appropriate food leftovers while fertilizing the soil. Ducks could help control pests. Grazing animals would manage vegetation in landscapes suited to them. Manure would return nutrients to the earth instead of becoming concentrated pollution in enormous industrial facilities.

    Their numbers would be determined by what the land could sustain, not by how many animal products could be sold.

    Some communities might choose to keep no animals. Others might integrate them into gardens, food forests and regenerative farms. There would be no economic incentive to turn a few animals into an ever-expanding industry.

    Freedom would exist within responsibility.

    A predominantly plant-based civilization could therefore contain far more animal life than our current meat-based civilization. The difference would be that most animals would live freely in functioning ecosystems instead of being bred in factories for human consumption.

    Our Place

    Humans do not need to withdraw completely from nature. 

    We need to rediscover our place within it.

    Where natural predators could return, they would again help regulate herbivore populations. In places where predators could not safely return or where certain populations exceeded what recovering landscapes could support, humans could hunt as responsible caretakers. 

    With a shift to a plant based diet we would free up so much land that herbivores would return in an unheard of abundance.

    That would not mean commercial hunting, killing for entertainment or exterminating predators that compete with us. Hunting would be guided by ecological knowledge, genuine need and respect for the whole living system. What was taken would be used, and populations would never be reduced beyond what nature could replace.

    In this way, native people like eskimo would be encouraged to live in the natural way they have lived for millennia, hunting what they needed for themselves.

    The same principle would apply to fishing.

    Some people would choose never to hunt, fish or eat animals. Others would participate in this form of stewardship. A mature civilization would accommodate both without rebuilding industrial animal production or commercial fishing.

    Humanity would no longer behave as the owner of nature. We would participate in its circulation, protecting the health of the whole while taking only what the living system could continuously regenerate.

    The Wild Return

    The choice is not between our present civilization and an animal-free world.

    The real choice is between continuing to dominate nature and learning to live within it.

    The Choice

    We can keep burning fossil fuels, draining rivers, emptying oceans, clearing forests, breeding billions of animals and converting the living world into products. 

    Or we can end the industries destroying the planet, organize our resources intelligently and give nature the space to recover.

    A resource-based economy could make that transformation possible. It would remove the financial forces demanding endless extraction and replace them with conscious stewardship of the Earth.

    Children would grow up seeing herds moving across open landscapes, birds filling restored wetlands, trout swimming up clear rivers and great shoals of fish moving through living seas. Animals could inhabit our homesteads and food forests while immense wild populations flourished beyond them.

    Humanity would no longer encounter animals mainly as packaged products or images on screens. We would meet them again as fellow participants in the same living world.

    The wild return would not be nature reclaiming the Earth from humanity.

    It would be humanity finally returning to nature.

    A world with a global resource based economy can be hard to imagine.

    That is exactly why I wrote the novel Waking Up – A journey towards a new dawn for humanity.

    The novel gives a glimpse into a future where humanity has chosen to go in this direction, restoring the nature completely while living within it as caretakers.

    The story is told through the bewildered billionaire Benjamin Michaels and his awakening into this new world after 100 years of cryonic preservation.

    If you like, you can discover his story here.

    And please share this article if it resonates.

  • The New World Next Week

    The New World Next Week

    The news arrived the other day with another record humanity should never have wanted to break:

    August 2026 was the hottest August ever measured—and, together with July 2023, the hottest month ever recorded globally. The average temperature was 16.96°C, approximately 1.65°C above the pre-industrial level. The surface of the world’s oceans also reached record temperatures.

    Western Europe experienced its hottest summer ever recorded, accompanied by persistent heatwaves, drought and forest fires.

    This is not a prediction about some distant future. It is happening now.

    And the primary cause is no mystery:

    human greenhouse-gas emissions, above all from burning fossil fuels.

    That is the terrifying part.

    But it is also the clue.

    Still Burning

    Climate change is not something that simply happened to us. It is not an entirely natural force over which humanity has no control. We are actively producing it every day.

    Every ton of coal we burn, every barrel of oil we consume and every cubic meter of fossil gas we burn and release adds to the problem. Every forest destroyed, every unnecessary product manufactured and every resource extracted, processed and transported requires more energy and puts further pressure on the living systems that sustain us.

    We are not merely living with climate change.

    We are continuously creating more of it.

    The Good News

    The good news is that we can change what happens next. But only if we are willing to confront what the situation actually requires.

    Living and Thriving

    If humanity wants to continue living—and  thriving—on this planet, and not perish, we must reduce greenhouse-gas emissions as quickly as physically possible. Not through another collection of distant promises, voluntary targets and carefully negotiated compromises, but through immediate physical action.

    We must stop burning fossil fuels wherever they are not absolutely essential. We must stop unnecessary extraction, unnecessary transportation, unnecessary production and the deliberate manufacturing of short-lived and largely useless products. We must stop using vast quantities of energy and resources merely to keep money circulating through the economy.

    We cannot wait until 2050 to begin behaving as though our survival matters.

    We have to do something now. Like, next week.

    The Predicament

    But here we encounter an enormous problem.

    What happens to the economy if we suddenly stop all nonessential fossil-fuel use and unnecessary production and consumption?

    Factories close. Airlines cancel flights. Oil companies collapse. Retail sales fall. Advertising agencies lose their clients. Transport companies lose their contracts. Millions of people lose their jobs. Investments lose their value. Pension funds are threatened. Tax revenues disappear. Debts cannot be repaid. Governments face economic crisis.

    Under the monetary system, reducing production and consumption rapidly enough to protect the climate would trigger a global depression.

    The physical world needs us to stop.

    The economic system needs us to continue.

    That is the trap.

    Harmful Dependence

    Almost everyone depends upon the continuation of harmful activity in one way or another. People need transportation. Workers need wages. Companies need sales. Governments need taxes. Banks need debts to be repaid with interest. Investors need returns. Entire national economies depend upon continued growth.

    Even when something is environmentally destructive and physically unnecessary, it may remain economically essential because someone’s income depends upon producing it.

    Slow Response

    This is why the response to climate change remains so slow. We are trying to save the planet without disturbing the system that is causing it.

    Enough Energy

    The Sun provides Earth with more than 6,000 times as much energy as humanity currently uses. 

    Read that again.

    6000 times. More than we currently use. 

    Energy is not the problem.

     However, we capture only about 10 exa joules of solar energy annually, compared with approximately 620 exajoules of humanity’s total energy use today. With today’s technology, however, we could rapidly expand solar production to meet that demand ensuring all our energy needs are covered without pollution.

     . And in a resource-based economy, without today’s enormous overproduction and waste, we would need far less energy in the first place.

    Not every fossil-fuel-dependent machine can be replaced overnight though. Electrical grids must be expanded. Storage must be built. Ships, aircraft, furnaces and heavy industrial processes require new systems. Some essential fossil-fuel use would therefore have to continue temporarily while alternatives were introduced.

    But we could decide immediately that fossil fuels would henceforth be reserved only for absolutely essential functions that cannot yet be replaced.

    We Could Stop

    We could stop almost everything else next week.

    • We could stop producing disposable products designed to be replaced rather than repaired 
    • We could stop manufacturing endless variations of essentially identical goods merely so that competing companies can remain profitable 
    • We could stop transporting resources and products back and forth across the planet when they could be produced locally instead 
    • We could stop extracting materials for things nobody genuinely needs

    Easier Transition

    By reducing unnecessary production first, we would also make the energy transition much easier. We would not have to replace every unit of fossil energy currently consumed because an enormous part of that energy serves the needs of the monetary system rather than the physical needs of humanity.

    We already have enough energy to create a sustainable civilization.

    What we do not have is an economic system capable of accepting enough.

    Next Week

    Suppose humanity decided to do it next week. We collectively decide that enough is enough. We decide we want to continue living and thriving on this planet together. Together we decide to save the planet, save nature and save ourselves.

    All nonessential fossil-fuel burning would stop. All nonessential extraction would stop. Factories producing unnecessary and deliberately short-lived products would stop. Advertising intended to stimulate artificial demand would become obsolete.

    Food production, water supplies, medicine, sanitation, housing, communication and emergency services would continue. Remaining fossil fuels would be carefully allocated to essential purposes while renewable infrastructure is developed as quickly as physically possible.

    But nobody would lose access to food because their workplace closed. Nobody would lose their home because an unnecessary factory stopped producing. Nobody would be denied healthcare because their employer no longer needed them.

    Instead of losing their livelihoods, people would be liberated from work that humanity no longer needs. Those who wanted to participate could contribute to building renewable-energy systems, restoring forests and wetlands, developing durable products, repairing infrastructure, growing food and caring for their communities.

    Resources would no longer be allocated according to profitability or purchasing power. They would be mapped, monitored and coordinated according to availability, sustainability and actual human need.

    That would be the beginning of the global resource-based economy.

    The entire physical transformation could not be completed next week. But the new world could begin next week.

    Ending Money

    Money would no longer determine who was allowed to access the resources necessary for life.

    There would be no wages to lose, no mortgages to default on, no companies forced into bankruptcy and no governments deprived of tax revenue. The end of unnecessary production would not produce mass poverty because access to life would no longer depend upon employment.

    No Separation

    This is why we cannot separate the environmental crisis from the monetary system.

    If we merely order companies to stop producing, society collapses economically. If we ask them to reduce production voluntarily, most cannot do so without losing revenue, laying off workers or being overtaken by competitors. If we leave the transition to the market, every essential decision must first pass through the questions of cost, profit and return on investment.

    A resource-based economy would ask completely different questions:

    What do people actually need?

    What resources does Earth have available?

    How can those resources be used sustainably?

    How quickly can we replace fossil fuels?

    How can we provide everyone with a secure and meaningful life while restoring the planet?

    For the first time, our social system would be aligned with physical reality.

    Ready Together

    Such a transformation cannot simply be imposed from above.

    Governments cannot announce the end of money on Monday and expect everyone to understand how to live on Tuesday. People must be ready for it. They must be able to imagine a world in which nobody buys or sells anything, yet everyone can access what they need.

    That may be the greatest obstacle of all.

    Humanity has been conditioned for thousands of years to think in terms of money, trade, ownership, debt and exchange. We struggle to imagine production without profit, contribution without wages or access without payment. The monetary system feels like part of nature because everyone alive was born into it.

    But money is not a law of nature.

    It is a human arrangement. And human arrangements can change when they no longer serve life.

    The Vision

    Before we can create a resource-based economy, enough people must be able to see that it is possible. We must understand that a world without money does not have to mean deprivation, authoritarian control or the destruction of individual freedom. It can mean exactly the opposite: 

    • security without employment 
    • access without money 
    • contribution without coercion 
    • and freedom without the constant fear of economic exclusion

    We do not only need new infrastructure.

    We need a new understanding of what civilization can be.

    Waking Up

    That is why I wrote Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity.

    The novel is not a manifesto or a blueprint. It does not claim to possess a complete plan for how the monetary system should end or precisely how every resource on Earth should be coordinated.

    It is an inspiration.

    Through the eyes of Benjamin Michaels, who awakens a century into the future, it offers a vision of what everyday life in a moneyless, resource-based civilization could be like. It allows us to experience a world built upon sharing, stewardship, cooperation and intelligent resource management before that world physically exists.

    The articles on this website explore these possibilities more directly and from many different perspectives. Readers who want to go deeper can also sign up for the newsletter and download the free companion book.

    Humanity already has the energy.

    We already have the technology.

    We already possess the knowledge and productive capacity.

    We could stop most nonessential fossil-fuel burning, over-extraction, overproduction and waste next week. We could protect every person during the transition by replacing the monetary system with one designed around resources and human needs.

    The planet would not heal overnight. But we could stop deepening the wound and allow the healing to begin as quickly as physically possible.

    The new world is not waiting for another invention.

    It is waiting for humanity to wake up.

    We could begin next week.

  • Repeating Revolutions

    Repeating Revolutions

    In 1917, one of the largest and seemingly most permanent empires in the world collapsed. The Russian Empire had been ruled by the Romanov dynasty for more than three centuries. Yet within months, Tsar Nicholas II had abdicated, imperial rule had ended, and the Bolsheviks had seized power from the provisional government that replaced it.

    Two Revolutions

    There were actually two Russian revolutions that year. The February Revolution brought down the monarchy after strikes, demonstrations and food shortages erupted in Petrograd. When soldiers were ordered to suppress the crowds, many refused and joined them. Once the government could no longer rely upon the army, the empire quickly disintegrated.

    The Bolsheviks took power later, during the October Revolution. The Provisional Government had continued Russia’s participation in World War I, delayed the redistribution of land and failed to restore food supplies, economic stability or public confidence. The Bolsheviks gained support through a direct promise: “Peace, Land and Bread.”

    The old order had collapsed. 

    A completely different political and economic system was about to take its place.

    The Soviet Union emerged as a one-party socialist state in which private ownership was largely replaced by centralized state control over production, labor and resources.

    More than a century later, humanity may again be approaching a period of fundamental change.

    But what kind of change?

    The similarities today

    The world today is not Russia in 1917. Most people are not living under an absolute monarch, standing in bread lines or deserting from a world war. Modern democracies provide rights and political participation that did not exist under the tsars. History never repeats itself exactly.

    The Same Feeling

    But many people today feel much as millions of Russians felt before the revolutions: exploited, hopeless and afraid.

    Under the Romanovs, political power was concentrated in one ruling family and protected by the nobility, the military, the bureaucracy and the secret police. Ordinary people had almost no meaningful influence over the decisions governing their lives. The tsar claimed virtually unlimited authority over Russia, while a small elite controlled much of the country’s land and wealth.

    Power today is not concentrated in one royal family. It is distributed among governments, banks, corporations, billionaires, financial institutions and technology companies. People can vote, protest and change governments, but many of the most important decisions remain constrained by markets, debt, private ownership and profitability. Political parties may alternate in power while the fundamental economic structure remains largely untouched.

    People can vote for different politicians, but they are rarely asked whether access to food, housing, healthcare and the Earth’s resources should remain dependent upon purchasing power.

    Serfdom

    Serfdom has formally disappeared, but economic dependence remains. Most people must sell their labor to obtain the money required to live. They are legally free to leave an employer, but they are not free from the need for income.

    Rent, mortgages, debt and living costs can keep people working under conditions they would never freely choose if their survival were secure.

    This does not mean that modern employment is identical to Russian serfdom. It means that legal freedom can coexist with severe economic dependence.

    The Romanovs treated political power as their inherited property. Today, individuals and institutions treat enormous parts of the Earth as financial property. Land, housing, minerals, forests, water sources and productive infrastructure can be controlled by a minority, even though everyone depends upon them. In both cases, concentrated control over essential resources gives a relatively small number of people enormous power over the lives of others.

    Many people therefore work harder while falling further behind. They struggle with rent, mortgages, debt, food prices and insecure employment while watching a small minority accumulate extraordinary wealth. They are told that the economy is growing even when their own security is shrinking. Governments say that there is not enough money for essential services while finding enormous sums for banks, corporations and weapons.

    Today’s fear also has dimensions that the people of Russia in 1917 could hardly have imagined. People fear climate change, ecological collapse, expanding wars, technological surveillance, artificial intelligence and automation taking away their livelihoods. They fear that their children will inherit a planet less stable, less fertile and more violent than the one they knew.

    The similarity is not that our world is identical to tsarist Russia. It is that once again, many people feel trapped inside a system they did not choose, cannot meaningfully influence and no longer trust to provide them with a secure future.

    The Romanovs claimed Russia.

    Today, the monetary system claims the planet.

    People work hard while falling further behind. They struggle with rent, mortgages, debt, food prices and insecure employment as AI takes over, while watching a small minority accumulate extraordinary wealth. They are told that the economy is growing even when their own security is shrinking. Governments say that there is not enough money for essential services while finding enormous sums for banks, corporations, weapons and wars.

    Today’s fear also has dimensions the people of Russia in 1917 could hardly have imagined.

    People fear climate change, ecological collapse and the depletion of the natural systems upon which civilization depends. They fear existing wars expanding into a larger global confrontation. They fear AI and automation taking away their livelihoods, technological surveillance taking away their privacy and their children inheriting a planet less stable than the one they knew.

    They see extraordinary technology and productive capacity all around them, yet feel increasingly powerless within the system controlling it.

    They are told that artificial intelligence and automation represent progress, while knowing that their access to food, housing and security still depends upon employment and money. Technology capable of relieving humanity of exhausting labor is therefore experienced as a threat. If a machine can perform their work, they may lose not only the work but also their income and their ability to live.

    As in Russia before the revolutions, a growing number of people no longer believe that the existing order represents them, protects them or offers them a credible future. They sense that something is fundamentally wrong, even when they disagree about the cause.

    Some blame billionaires. Some blame governments, corporations, immigrants, foreign powers or political parties. Some believe capitalism has failed and demand socialism or communism. Others blame excessive government and call for an even freer market.

    The dissatisfaction is real. But what exactly needs to change?

    Beneath the ideologies

    The problem goes deeper than any particular government, corporation, billionaire or political ideology.

    Capitalist and communist societies have appeared radically different, but both have organized human life through money, wages, economic obligation and centralized control over resources. Both have required people to work for access to the necessities of life. Both have treated the Earth primarily as property to be controlled and distributed by those holding economic or political power.

    The recurring problem is not simply who controls the monetary system.

    It is the monetary system itself.

    Money makes access to life dependent upon purchasing power. Food may exist while people go hungry. Houses may stand empty while people remain homeless. Medicines may be available while patients cannot afford them. Essential work may need to be done while willing people remain unemployed because hiring them is not profitable.

    The monetary system also requires continuous economic growth and consumption on a finite planet. Resources are extracted and converted into financial value, while ecological destruction is treated as an external cost not related to the monetary system. Products are designed to be replaced, useful goods are discarded, and resources are wasted whenever preservation or distribution is less profitable than continued production.

    Artificial intelligence and automation reveal another contradiction. We are developing machines to reduce the need for human labor while maintaining an economy in which most people must sell their labor to survive. Technology that should liberate humanity can therefore produce unemployment, poverty and an even greater concentration of wealth.

    The change we need cannot be limited to higher wages, different taxes, new politicians or transferring corporations into state ownership. Such reforms may reduce suffering, but as long as resources remain owned, access remains conditional, and decisions remain constrained by money and profitability, not much will change.

    Humanity must move beyond an economic system based on money, trade, debt, profit and ownership.

    The alternative is a global resource-based economy.

    In such a system, the Earth’s resources would be recognized as the shared inheritance of humanity and stewarded for the benefit of all life. Production and distribution would be based upon available resources, ecological limits and measured needs rather than purchasing power and financial return. Automation would reduce unnecessary labor for everyone instead of threatening people with poverty. The necessities of life would be provided through access rather than sale.

    That would be a transformation far deeper than the one attempted in Russia. It would not merely change who controls the system. It would change the fundamental relationship between humanity, technology and the planet itself.

    If we are considering change of that magnitude, the Russian revolutions have essential lessons for us.

    Changing the owners

    The Bolsheviks succeeded because the Russian system had already lost its legitimacy. War, hunger, inequality, administrative failure and military collapse had made continued obedience increasingly impossible.

    This offers the first lesson: systems ultimately survive because people continue to participate in them and believe there is no workable alternative. When that belief disappears, apparently permanent institutions can unravel with extraordinary speed.

    A Free and Cooperative Civilization

    But the Russian Revolution also teaches us that replacing the monetary system cannot be achieved simply by attacking the ruling class, capturing governments or declaring a new economic order. That may destroy an old structure, but it does not automatically create a free and cooperative civilization.

    The Bolsheviks replaced private economic power with centralized state power. Money, wages, hierarchy, coercive labor, police authority, prisons, armies and scarcity remained. Ownership was transferred, but the deeper relationship between people and resources was not fundamentally transcended. The state became the commanding owner, while ordinary people remained dependent upon decisions made above them.

    Transferring the world’s resources from corporations to governments would not be enough today either. 

    State ownership is still ownership. 

    Replacing billionaires and corporate boards with ministers and political committees would simply place the same commanding power in different hands.

    The objective cannot be to decide who should own the Earth.

    The objective must be to recognize that the Earth cannot legitimately be owned.

    No New Enemies

    A global resource-based economy must be something very different from a twentieth-century revolution.

    It cannot be built around enemies. The rich cannot become a new aristocracy marked for destruction, and workers cannot become instruments of another political elite. If violence, hatred and revenge become the foundations of the transition, they will also become foundations of the civilization emerging from it.

    Not Only in Banks

    The monetary system exists not only in banks, corporations and governments, but in our habits, fears, ambitions, identities and assumptions about human nature. Removing particular people while retaining that consciousness would merely reproduce the same system under new names.

    No Monetary Tsar

    There is no monetary tsar sitting at the top whom humanity can overthrow. Governments, banks, corporations and wealthy individuals exercise enormous power, but they all operate within a system maintained by the participation of nearly everyone.

    This does not absolve anyone of responsibility for exploitation or ecological destruction. It means that removing the people currently benefiting from the structure will not remove the structure itself. Unless the system and the thinking supporting it are changed, new elites will emerge.

    A Disciplined Minority

    A resource-based economy also cannot be imposed by a disciplined minority claiming to represent everyone. Humanity must understand what it is choosing, why the existing system has become obsolete, and how access, stewardship, decision-making and personal freedom will function afterward. Otherwise, uncertainty will create resistance, resistance will invite coercion, and coercion will create another authoritarian state.

    How Change Happens

    Fundamental change has rarely begun with a majority of the population consciously designing and demanding the next system. New ideas, technologies and social arrangements are usually developed by relatively small groups. The majority becomes involved later, once the emerging system becomes visible, useful and increasingly difficult to resist.

    The monetary system itself was not created through a global referendum. The concept of ownership,different forms of accounting, debt, currency, banking, wages and private property developed over thousands of years. They were introduced and expanded by merchants, rulers, landowners, governments and financial institutions. The majority gradually adapted because money became embedded in taxation, trade, employment and access to resources. Eventually, participation was no longer experienced as a conscious choice. It was simply how society worked.

    The Transition

    A global resource-based economy may begin in much the same way: not because billions of people simultaneously understand and approve every detail, but because a relatively small number of people begin constructing something that works better.

    They may establish Free Layers, moneyless communities, shared production systems and new forms of resource stewardship. As these alternatives demonstrate that they can provide greater security, freedom and ecological stability, more people will participate. What begins at the margins can gradually become the new foundation.

    The critical mass behind such a transition does not necessarily have to be a numerical majority. It must be large, capable and credible enough to make the alternative function. Once that happens, much of the population may simply adapt to the new reality, just as previous generations adapted to money, industrialization, electricity, digital communication and countless other transformations they did not personally initiate.

    But there is a decisive difference between initiating change and imposing it.

    A minority may develop the vision, build the first working systems and inspire wider participation. It must not appoint itself as humanity’s new ruling class. The purpose of the pioneers is not to capture power and command everyone else. It is to demonstrate an alternative that people can understand, enter voluntarily and eventually help govern as equal stewards.

    The transition does not require everyone to awaken at the same moment. It requires enough people to awaken, begin building and make the alternative real. The majority can then adapt—not through force, but because the new system has become safer, simpler and more intelligent than the one it replaces.

    Build before breaking

    The Russian Revolution also demonstrates the danger of destroying institutions before viable replacements exist.

    The Bolsheviks possessed a powerful method for taking control, but no mature infrastructure capable of delivering abundance, democratic participation and individual freedom across a vast society devastated by war. Scarcity then justified centralization, emergency measures and repression.

    Today, we have possibilities Russia did not have: global communications, real-time resource inventories, satellites, advanced logistics, renewable energy, automation, robotics, artificial intelligence and the technical ability to coordinate production according to measured needs rather than profitability.

    But those capacities must be developed into working alternatives before the old system fails.

    The new world must become visible before the old one disappears.

    Prosperity Without Property

    The Bolsheviks had “Peace, Land and Bread.” A resource-based movement also needs a proposition people can immediately understand:

    Prosperity without Property

    Security without employment. 

    Access without money. 

    Housing without debt. 

    Technology serving everyone. 

    Earth’s resources stewarded for the benefit of all.

    People must see that they are not being asked to sacrifice themselves for another political experiment. They are being invited to participate in creating a civilization that no longer makes survival dependent upon money.

    Must catastrophe come first?

    The most important lesson may concern timing.

    World War I helped create the conditions for the Russian revolutions. It caused mass death, hunger, inflation, military mutiny and administrative collapse. It destroyed what remained of the population’s confidence in imperial rule.

    Does humanity need another world war before it becomes willing to change?

    We already have wars, and they are devastating for everyone directly affected by them. But they have not created a single global breakdown comparable to what World War I did to Russia. Much of the world continues to function well enough for the existing order to appear permanent.

    But another world war today would not merely repeat World War I. Nuclear weapons, autonomous weapons, cyberwarfare, biological threats and attacks on energy, communications, agriculture and water systems could destroy the infrastructure upon which billions of people depend. Combined with climate change and ecological degradation, such a war could make large parts of the planet increasingly difficult to inhabit.

    World War I helped destroy an empire while leaving enough of the country and the planet intact for another political order to be built. 

    A new world war could destroy not only the existing order, but the foundations required to build anything after it.

    This time, war might not create the conditions for revolution.

    It might eliminate them.

    Learning Instead

    The Russian revolutions teach us that an old world can fall far faster than anyone expects. They also teach us that destroying it is much easier than creating something genuinely new.

    If no credible alternative has been prepared when the monetary system loses legitimacy, fear, nationalism, authoritarianism and conflict may fill the vacuum. The task is therefore not to provoke collapse. It is to make the alternative visible, credible, tested and understandable before collapse—or technological obsolescence—forces the decision upon us.

    Again and again, revolutions have removed rulers without removing domination. They have changed governments, property arrangements and official ideologies while preserving hierarchy, scarcity, coercion and concentrated power.

    That is how revolutions repeat themselves.

    The transition to a global resource-based economy must therefore be a manifestation rather than a conquest: not one class defeating another, but humanity recognizing that the system itself has become obsolete.

    No executions. No civil war. No dictatorship claiming to act on behalf of the future. No state becoming the new owner of humanity and the Earth.

    The revolution must occur in human understanding first, followed by organized construction, voluntary participation and eventually global voluntary agreement. It must replace the struggle over ownership with shared stewardship and economic dependence with unconditional access to the necessities of life.

    Global Awakening

    It may be called a global awakening, spiritual awakening, enlightenment or simply awareness of how deeply the monetary system has colonized our minds. Its values of competition, ownership and accumulation do not exist only in banks and markets. They exist within us, teaching us to grasp and hoard resources while regarding other human beings as competitors.

    Earth Belongs to no One

    Changing the system therefore also requires changing our relationship with the world and with one another. We must awaken to the understanding that Earth belongs to no one, that we are all responsible for it, and that every individual is a steward of humanity’s shared inheritance. Collaboration must become the new credo, replacing the pursuit of personal accumulation.

    Global coordination will still be necessary, but centralized control will not. We need transparent global information about resources and ecological limits, while decisions remain distributed among communities, regions and openly accountable councils. AI can help us understand the whole, but it must remain a tool rather than become our ruler.

    The safeguard against a new dictatorship cannot be structural alone. It must also be embedded in human consciousness. We are not mindless sheep requiring an authority to control us. We are responsible participants in one living world—globally coordinated, locally empowered and collectively stewarded.

    Waking Up

    In the novel Waking Up – A journey towards a new dawn for humanity you are not given a manifesto or blueprint for the new world. Rather, it is a story seen through the eyes of a bewildered billionaire waking up in this new world. It is meant to inspire rather than prescribe.

    Discover the story here

  • The System of Scarcity 

    The System of Scarcity 

    Europe’s gas storage is low. Gas prices may rise. Electricity prices may rise with them—even in Sweden.

    This is presented as if Europe is running out of energy.

    Meanwhile, the sun continues to pour an incomprehensible amount of energy onto Spain and the rest of southern Europe every day. The wind continues to blow across the Earth. Rivers continue to flow through Scandinavia. We already possess the technology required to capture, store, distribute and intelligently combine all of these sources.

    The gas may be scarce.

    Energy is not.

    What we are witnessing is not merely an energy problem. It is a perfect demonstration of the system of scarcity.

    The Actual Need

    Europe does not need gas.

    Europe needs energy.

    Gas is only one possible means of providing heat, electricity and industrial power. Yet because enormous investments, markets and infrastructure have been built around gas, a shortage of gas is treated as a shortage of energy itself.

    This is extraordinarily narrow thinking.

    The Clean River

    Imagine someone standing beside a clean river and declaring that there is nothing to drink because the shop has run out of bottled water. The person has confused one commercial product with the underlying need that the product was supposed to satisfy.

    We do this throughout the economy.

    We do not fundamentally need oil.

    We need transportation, heat, materials and industrial processes. We do not need one particular metal. We need whatever function that metal performs. We do not need concrete in every conceivable construction. We need safe and durable buildings. We do not need one particular crop from one particular supplier. We need nutritious food.

    The Sane Civilization

    In a sane civilization, we would always begin by identifying the actual need. We would then examine every available resource, technology and method capable of meeting it.

    If one resource became scarce, we would not run around like headless chickens announcing the end of civilization. We would look for alternatives. We would substitute materials, redesign products, recycle components, improve efficiency or find a completely different way to achieve the desired result.

    A particular resource may be scarce without the solution being scarce.

    But that is not how our present system thinks.

    Market Thinking

    Unfortunately we don’t live in a sane civilization at the moment.

    The monetary system does not primarily ask how human needs can be met with the resources available. It asks what can be owned, traded and sold profitably through the system that already exists.

    Europe has built a market around gas. Companies own extraction rights, pipelines, terminals, storage facilities, power plants and contracts. Governments have designed policies around this structure. Financial markets trade expectations about its future availability. Millions of incomes, investments and institutional interests have become attached to maintaining it.

    Consequently, when gas becomes scarce, the response is not simply to move as quickly as possible toward whatever abundant alternatives are available. The shortage becomes a market event. Prices rise. Traders speculate. Households worry. Industries demand support. Governments compete for supplies.

    The system has mistaken its own dependency for a law of nature.

    In Sweden, electricity prices can be affected by European gas prices even though very little Swedish electricity is generated from gas. Electricity is traded through interconnected markets, and expensive gas-generated electricity elsewhere can influence prices far beyond the place where that gas is actually burned.

    The Labyrinth

    Spain may simultaneously receive an abundance of solar energy. But instead of regarding this as part of Europe’s shared energy capacity, we place a labyrinth of markets, ownership structures, pricing mechanisms, national interests and insufficiently coordinated infrastructure between the sunlight and the people who need energy.

    Then we point to the resulting bottleneck and call it scarcity.

    We have created a monetary maze between the resource and the need. When the resource cannot pass efficiently through the maze, we conclude that there is not enough.

    Scarcity Within

    The deepest scarcity, however, is not found in a gas storage facility. It is created in the human mind.

    It begins with the belief that there cannot possibly be enough for everyone. It is the narrow, frightened and egoic conviction that human beings are separate competitors trapped in a struggle over an inadequate world. If I do not acquire as much as possible for myself, someone else will take it. If others gain access, I must be losing something.

    From that belief, we created institutions based on ownership, competition, accumulation and exclusion. Those institutions then restrict access to resources and produce deprivation. Finally, the deprivation is offered as proof that the original belief was correct.

    The scarcity mindset creates the scarcity system. The scarcity system restricts access. Restricted access reinforces the scarcity mindset.

    It is a closed loop operating inside a world of extraordinary natural wealth, technological capability and human ingenuity.

    This does not mean that every resource is infinite. Earth is a finite planet. Some materials are genuinely rare. Ecosystems have limits, and reckless extraction can destroy the very foundations of human life.

    But physical limits do not require a civilization based on permanent scarcity. They require intelligence.

    They require us to know what resources exist, understand the rate at which they can safely be used, eliminate unnecessary waste, recover materials, develop alternatives and design products around what is sustainably available.

    The belief that physical limits force us to compete, hoard and exclude one another is not realism. It is a failure of imagination.

    Money Needs Scarcity

    Money does not merely help us manage scarcity. The monetary system depends upon scarcity in order to function.

    If something is genuinely abundant and freely accessible, there is little reason to buy or sell it. Nobody can build an enormous fortune selling something that everyone can already obtain freely whenever they need it.

    For trade to remain necessary, there must be a barrier between people and the things they require. Sometimes that barrier is a genuine physical limitation. But it can also be created through ownership, prices, patents, restricted distribution, deliberate underproduction or the destruction of surplus.

    If there were true abundance, we would not need money or trading.

    This creates a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the monetary system. It claims to pursue abundance through economic growth, innovation and increased production. Yet genuine abundance threatens the very prices and profits upon which the system depends.

    If housing were freely available to everyone, housing would cease to be an enormously profitable investment vehicle. If clean energy were universally available, energy empires could no longer collect fortunes from controlling access to it. If nutritious food were produced in abundance and distributed according to need, hunger could no longer coexist with mountains of discarded food. If knowledge and technology were openly shared, artificial monopolies built around controlling them would disappear.

    The system therefore does not merely distribute what exists. It determines who is permitted access.

    That is why food can be destroyed while people go hungry. Houses can remain empty while people are homeless. Factories can remain idle while essential needs go unmet. Medicines can exist while patients are unable to obtain them. Renewable energy can surround us while families fear their next electricity bill.

    These are not always shortages of the things themselves. They are shortages of permission, purchasing power and access.

    Proof of Abundance

    Despite the extreme inefficiency of the present system, we are, amazingly enough, still here. We extract vastly more resources than necessary because of the profit motive, manufacture disposable products, transport goods absurd distances, destroy unsold food, demolish usable buildings, discard functioning technology and bury valuable materials in landfills. 

    Yet Earth has continued to provide for billions of people in spite of all this waste.

    That alone is evidence of the extraordinary abundance our planet has to offer.

    But under the monetary system, this abundance is available primarily to those with enough money to access it. Some people can command more food, land, energy, housing and manufactured products than they could possibly use, while others are denied the essentials of life. What we call abundance today is therefore an abundance built upon extreme inequality, relentless extraction and enormous waste.

    It is not an abundance we have created intelligently. It is an abundance we have plundered selectively.

    And this cannot continue for much longer—not if we expect humanity to continue for much longer on this planet. The fact that Earth has survived our inefficiency until now does not mean its capacity is limitless. It means we have been given an extraordinary margin of abundance and have mistaken that generosity for permission to waste it.

    Manufacturing Waste

    The present system extracts far more resources than humanity actually needs—not because people require everything being produced, but because companies must continue selling in order to survive and generate profit. A product that lasts for fifty years is less profitable than one that must be replaced every five. A device that can be repaired and upgraded indefinitely creates fewer sales than one that is sealed, unsupported and eventually declared obsolete.

    The result is an economy built around continuous turnover. Countless competing companies manufacture slightly different versions of the same products, duplicate factories and distribution networks, cover everything in disposable packaging and spend enormous resources persuading us to replace things that still work. Unsold food is destroyed, usable clothing is discarded, buildings remain empty, machinery stands idle and valuable materials are buried in landfills because providing access without payment would undermine their market value.

    Humanity now extracts approximately 100 billion tonnes of materials from Earth every year, while the global economy remains only about eight percent circular. There is no precise calculation of how much extraction would disappear without the profit motive, but a reduction of twenty to forty percent is entirely conceivable once products were designed for durability, repair, sharing, standardization and complete material recovery. The same resources could provide a far higher standard of living while placing dramatically less pressure on the planet.

    This means that removing the profit incentive would not create deprivation. It would effectively create abundance.

    We would no longer need to extract enough resources to satisfy human needs and keep billions of products flowing continuously through the machinery of sales and profit. We would produce what was actually needed, make it as durable as possible, share rarely used equipment, repair what broke and recover its materials when it finally reached the end of its useful life.

    Abundance does not require producing an infinite number of disposable things. It means ensuring that everyone can access what they need. By removing the commercial requirement to manufacture, sell, discard and replace as much as possible, humanity could create greater abundance for everyone while extracting considerably less from Earth.

    Extreme Wealth

    This also explains why extreme billionaires could not exist in a world where everyone had enough.

    A billion euros is not a billion pieces of food, houses, cars or solar panels. It is a claim upon real resources and productive capacity. It gives one person extraordinary power to command land, materials, technology and human activity.

    That power has meaning only because access is unequally distributed.

    If everyone could obtain excellent housing, food, healthcare, education, transportation, communication and energy without payment, currency would lose  its practical power. A billionaire might still possess a vast numerical fortune, but there would be little that fortune could command which everyone else could not already access.

    Extreme wealth is therefore not evidence that society has created abundance. It is evidence that access to abundance has been concentrated through the ingenious monetary system. Ingenious for the billionaires, that is.

    The greater the distance between the billionaire and the person who cannot afford electricity, food or shelter, the more successfully the system has manufactured scarcity for one person while manufacturing almost unlimited purchasing power for another.

    The fortunes at the top and the deprivation at the bottom are not unrelated accidents. They are two results of the same system.

    Another Logic

    A sane world with a global resource-based economy would begin from a completely different question.

    Not:

    What can be sold?

    Not:

    Who can afford it?

    Not:

    Which shortage will produce the highest price?

    But:

    What do we need, what resources do we have available, and how can we use them intelligently for everyone?

    If humanity needed energy, we would map all available energy sources and build the most effective combination. Solar energy from sunnier regions could be integrated with wind, hydroelectricity, geothermal energy, storage and an interconnected grid. Production would be planned around physical reality rather than profitability.

    If a particular material became scarce, a global resource inventory would reveal that fact before it became a crisis. Products would be redesigned. Alternative materials would be developed. Existing components would be recovered. Wasteful uses would be discontinued, while essential uses received priority.

    There would still be limits. There would still be engineering challenges, ecological constraints and difficult decisions. But we would face those challenges as one civilization trying to solve them—not as competing owners attempting to profit from them.

    The greatest abundance available to humanity is not any single resource. It is our capacity to think, adapt, invent and cooperate. There are usually many ways to meet the same underlying need.

    Yet we suppress that abundance when we trap every solution inside the question of whether it is profitable.

    Europe worries about the gas in its storage tanks while an immense fusion reactor shines above us every day. That image captures the entire insanity of the present system.

    We are not living in a world without solutions. We are living inside a system that repeatedly overlooks them because they do not fit its narrow logic.

    The ultimate scarcity is not a lack of sunlight, resources, technology or human capability.

    It is the scarcity inside our thinking.

    And the moment we leave that thinking behind, we may discover that the world was far more abundant than we had ever allowed it to become.

    The Abundant World

    In the novel Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, billionaire Benjamin Michaels awakens in 2115 to discover that humanity has finally abandoned the system of scarcity. Money, trade and ownership have been replaced by stewardship, intelligent resource management and optimized sharing. The world did not become abundant because Earth suddenly produced infinite resources. It became abundant because humanity stopped wasting what it already had.

    Discover the world that became possible when humanity finally chose abundance over scarcity here.