under construction

Social organization

Social economy

Social society

The Age of Social

We need innovation not only in physical technologies but also in social architectures. If physical technologies are about the what of the economy, social architectures are about the who: who will make economic decisions, and how, using what kinds of organizing structures?

We know the next economy will require things like wind turbines, limits on carbon emissions, and sustainably managed forests. The questions that remain largely unanswered are about who will own these, who will control them, and who will flourish in the world they create.

Through systems thinking, we can see that the task of redesigning ownership is part of the larger task of bringing human civilization into harmony with the earth.

Living systems have the ability to make sudden, creative leaps into novelty, reorganizing themselves into something wholly new. They do this when they're undergoing intolerable stress. At critical points of instability, some new way of organizing things emerges. This may be what generative ownership design is: the something new emerging - the thing we need, at the very moment we need it.

It no longer seems sufficient to speak of economic democracy as the solution. A more appropriate frame of reference may be the living system of the planet.

How ownership is framed is more basic to our daily lives than the shape of democracy. (...) How owners wield their power over companies determines whether we're empowered or belittled by our work, how much anxiety we suffer over our debts, whether we're able to own a home or be secure in retirement.

emergence is about connecting with people who share a common vision. This is how local actions spring up, connect through networks, and strengthen into communities of practice. (...) Ultimately, a new system can emerge at greater scale: not magically, but through a combination of unplanned emergent activities and later more focused efforts.

For what's at work isn't economic innovation as it's usually meant, which is about better and better ways to make more and more money. This innovation is almost unimaginably more profound. It is a reinvention at the level of organizational purpose and structure. It is about creating economic architectures that are self-organized around serving the needs of life.

Emerging ownership models are new members of an older family of designs that include cooperatives, employee-owned firms, and government-sponsored enterprises. (...) As a class, these alternatives represent an emerging family of design. If industrial-age ownership is based on a monocultural model, emerging designs are as rich in biodiversity as a rainforest.

But as we make the painful turn into a new era - characterized by climate change, water shortages, species extinction, vast unemployment, stagnant wages, staggering differentials in wealth, and bloated debt loads - the industrial-age model of ownership is beginning to make less sense.

Questions about who owns the wealth-producing infrastructure of an economy, who controls it, whose interests it serves, are among the largest issues any society can face. Issues of who owns the sky in terms of carbon emission rights, who owns water, who owns development rights, are planetary in scope.