SUE's Blog

Today, we are halfway through the 21st century and I can’t believe I’ve made it this far. Yes, I literally cannot believe that I, along with many like-minded human beings from the Millennial age, not only saved the planet, its animals, and the human race on it, but we also made it a far better place to live than what it was back then. Today, in 2050, there’s ample food on everyone’s plate no matter where they live on the earth, a comfortable home to live in, good healthcare, and education as well. The nature is thriving as are the animals, there’s greenery all around, the air is clean, the sky is blue, and everyone is just happy and cooperative! But, how did we get here? Why do I say that I cannot believe the good world we are living in? Well, to know that, let me take you to the world that was back then first.

2024: I live in one of the most polluted cities in the world, Mumbai, in India. The human population has blown beyond the bottleneck in this region, majority of people have turned a blind eye towards the deteriorating climatic conditions, the increasing cruelty to animals, and the overall declining mental peace of themselves. Humans have become slaves to the consumerist lifestyle, leading them to live a selfish life without giving two hoots about the impact of their choices. The only hope in this almost dystopian human world is a group of few empathetic, calm-headed, forward-thinking, self-aware human beings realizing the need for action to change the way world thinks and works.

It’s time we stop thinking about short-term solutions that act just like instant relief medicines but do not treat the root cause. The root cause of everything wrong in this human-dominated world is the lack of empathy, kindness, and compassion. Humans have long forgotten their core trait of being human: the ability to feel empathy for others, the ability to be kind to every being, the ability to think consciously and choose, and the ability to be happy and cooperative.

The actual problem starts in childhood. Children are like learning machines (like artificial intelligence); what you feed them directly and indirectly is what they’ll grow into. The society slowly rubs off their core human traits of empathy, compassion, kindness, critical thinking, and conscious thinking ability by feeding them a consumerist mind-set that makes them selfish enough to not care about others. A lot begins at their food plate as well, where they start to disregard the lives of other sentient beings that are brought into existence, exploited, and killed just for their own consumption and benefits. This is where they start to devalue the resources they’ve been provided with and think that everything on this planet can be exploited for their benefit.

So what I’m doing today is educating the children and teenagers first. After all, the adults of today will not be the ones running the world in 2050, but it will be these children and teenagers of today (2024) who will run the world in 2050. I am adopting both approaches; top-down and bottom-up, to make sure that the young ones of today are more aware of what is happening in the world that doesn’t meet their eyes. They should know the impact of the choices they make today, which will determine how good or bad their future will be. I don’t want them to be another generation of short-term thinking human beings who know what they’ll get tomorrow but don’t know what will come the day after tomorrow.

Having a background in media and communication, I’m utilizing the network of people I have. I create awareness by taking informational sessions at schools and colleges that will make students aware of what’s happening and what will happen if they don’t change the way things are happening right now. I also partner with institutes to make audio-visual content with children for children. Here we break down complex terms, mythological stories, and deep issues into simple, understandable concepts with a quest to make them better human beings who make compassionate choices. This is a bottom-up approach to creating awareness at the grass root level. I’m also trying to work on a top-down approach where I find like-minded policy makers or myself become a policy maker to introduce policies, systems, and rules that will level-up the consciousness of children as well as adults and make them better, kinder, and more compassionate human beings.

It’s the year 2050.

The world is beautiful with happy, intelligent, and cooperative human beings! The journey to this day was not easy. In those days, a majority of my time went into doing the work that helped me earn money so that the survival of me and my family was assured, while I was also suffering from congenital heart disease, so taking care of my health was also important. But as you may know, when we work towards something with all our heart and mind, the universe also extends its hand to help us achieve it. On my journey, I found so many like-minded people from around the world with the same vision and the same vigour to change the way world works. They, too, were on a mission to save this world and make it a better place to live and thrive. One notable person who turned the spark inside me into flame was Suzanne Taylor, who was on a mission to shift mass consciousness so we-the-people create a world where we care about each other as much as we care about ourselves. Special thanks to Dr. Sailesh Rao for enlightening me about that special essay writing contest by Suzanne, where we threw ideas to save the world that led us to the world we are in today. It perfectly aligned with my long-term vision and helped me write down the things I wanted, and create a road-map. Since that special Valentine day of 2024, I, along with Suzanne, Dr. Sailesh, and many such like-minded people from around the world, set-off the butterfly effect that changed the world forever.

 

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. — Steve Jobs

My Essay
It is January 1, 2050, and I am grateful and joyous to be living in this peaceful world where humanity can thrive together. It is a blessing to reflect on how that happened.
In the conflict filled year of 2024, I got out into the world a message that could be transformative on a personal level within each individual family around the world.
This message came to me in 2021 from my granddaughter while she was still in the womb. As a Pediatric Speech and Language Therapist’ I had learned a tool from Lori Shayew, to communicate with the Higher Selves of non-verbal autistic children. Parents in the training group were having wonderful results, so I chose to experiment using it with my 2yr old grandson. He was very grateful that I was acknowledging him beyond his baby body, and he said he was part of a new wave of advanced beings coming to transform our troubled world. He told me I had to communicate immediately with the Higher Self of his cousin who was still in the womb. She was also delighted and had an important message for me to share around the world. Her message was that we all needed to begin communicating with the Higher Selves of all our children and grandchildren while they were still in the womb. That way we could get to know and learn from these evolved beings before we got distracted by their baby bodies. They were all coming to help transform our troubled world, but the only way they could come to Earth was through a baby body.
Once we deeply connected and communicated with their Higher Selves from conception, we could continue to do so after birth. Gradually more and more people were willing to participate, until it became fully accepted. The communication tool was shared and we came together in small groups to support the arrival and thrival of our new family members. We learned from these beloved members of our own families all the great transformational ideas and actions that led us to becoming the co-operative, loving society that we are in January 2050. We did not have to be changed by an external societal structure. What an incredible blessing!!!

In 2024 many people realized that “effective optimism” must first call out, and counter, dark forces that stand in the way of civilization thriving and nature evolving with the innovative brilliance that created life on Earth.

The February 1, 2001 publication of the Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome, Nature 409, 860–921, with its many co-authors, inspired the idea that a Global Genome Project should explore how experts and experiencers in a broad range of disciplines, and with a broad range of experiences, can share their findings and observations toward emergent, cross-disciplinary collaborative intelligence to save civilization and life on this planet.

The Global Genome Project was proposed as a strategic first step toward seeding a network that can grow to combat dark forces that target scapegoats and create bandwagons used by profiteers to control and manipulate humanity. A scapegoat is someone turned into an “outsider” through manipulation of public opinion. A bandwagon is a clan of “insiders” – buyers, voters, promoters – created through manipulation of public opinion such that those on the bandwagon accept a product or candidate or opinion without asking questions or thinking critically.

To say that climate change scientists scapegoated by supporters of the fossil fuels industry are like abolitionists scapegoated by slaveholding profiteers demands unpacking this analogy from diverse professional perspectives to show how scapegoating obstructs critical thinking and erodes freedom of speech and democracy. Let’s start first with these nine domains:

1. Democracy

 

1. National Security

 

1. Climate Change Mitigation

 

1. Scientific Integrity

 

1. Legal Precedent

 

1. The Arts (Film, Music, Visual, Writing, Other) and Innovation

 

1. Artificial Intelligence – Hearing the Wake-up Call

 

1. Equity – Hearing Diverse Voices and Multiple Points of View

 

Learning from History – Freedom of Inquiry and Freedom of Speech

As diverse as these domains appear on first glance, all have been inhibited by the manipulation of public opinion (scapegoats and bandwagons) and the lack of a vehicle to harness the diverse collaborative intelligence of many unique individuals.

The aha! of 2024 was the realization that Suzanne Taylor’s essay competition could become what Buckminster Fuller called a “trim tab”:

“Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Elizabeth again: The whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing on the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving that little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. It takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole ship of state is going to turn around. So I said, ‘Call me Trim Tab.’” (February 1972 interview, Playboy)

This essay aims to serve as a trim tab, proposing a framework into which diverse  experts and experiencers can contribute their findings and observations t(both success stories and issue reports) toward an emergent Global Genome Project. I briefly summarize nine proposed starting domains below:

Democracy, Policy and its Impact on Global Challenges

1. can be informed by this powerful

Al Gore 2024 overview

1. . The brilliance of Al Gore’s original 1992 book

Earth in the Balance: Forging a New Common Purpose

1. lay in how Gore drew analogies to human psychology. That brilliant strategy needs revival now – our global threats are rooted in human psychology: greed, targeting scapegoats, infomercials that create bandwagons, control and surveillance.

Security: National, Local, Personal.

1. The United States is the most violent nation in the world by many measures: number of mass murders per year, size of the U.S. military budget, numbers of incidents of police violence etc.

Japan

1. and

Tasmania

1. both enacted gun control laws that radically reduced individual violence and mass murders, making public places and gatherings safer. Should we assume that most U.S. citizens are on a bandwagon that accepts as necessary for our national security a

United States military budget

1. about three times that of China and at least ten times that of most other nations? Suppose that experts in this field agreed that national security could be achieved better by reducing the U.S. $877 Billion military budget to about $300 Billion, still more than the military budget of China, and this would leave the remaining $577 Billion to spend on regenerative missions for national and global security. This is just one opinion. The Global Genome Project would gather many divergent opinions, not only from military experts but also from experiencers, including families who’ve lost loved ones because of military interventions.

Climate Change Science: Using Data Analytics to Predict Trends

On January 25, 2024 Diane Bernard’s story recounted the more-than-a-decade long struggle of climate change scientist Professor Michael E. Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor, University of Pennsylvania and Director of the Center for Science and Sustainability, known for his work on the hockey stick graph of global temperature change. Michael Mann’s books hold the fossil fuels industry responsible for climate change threats to humanity and to all life on Earth.

Conservative writers supporting Big Oil targeted Michael Mann and compared him to a child molester. Such scapegoating threatened to make other climate scientists afraid to publish their work. On February 8, 2024 Michael Mann won a million dollar+ verdict in that lawsuit, a victory not only for climate change scientists but also toward making scapegoating unacceptable in scientific debates and reporting. That day journalist J.A. Ginsburg noted that the CO2 reading at Mauna Loa soared past 425 ppm, recalling her analogy: “Michael Mann is the next Rachel Carson.”

Filing a lawsuit should not be the only way to get such matters addressed. Lawsuits demand time and resources that most climate scientists don’t have.

The Global Genome Project will block bots and hackers from filing fake reports or manipulating the rating system and be able to detect patterns emerging by gathering reports from both experts and experiencers, with a content filtering system that allows reports most valued (read, commented on, acted on, shared) to rise.

Scientific Integrity – Freedom of Speech in Science

is more broadly impacted by scapegoating, and other forms of retribution, which can not only impact scientific method but also destroy freedom of speech, a prerequisite for democracy.

The Monsanto class action lawsuit for damages from the cancer-causing herbicide Roundup (first released in 1974) exposed how Monsanto scientists were routinely fired if they didn’t provide what Monsanto wanted – scientific confirmation that Roundup was “perfectly safe.” Monsanto closed in 2018 (taken over by Bayer) because of what this lawsuit exposed. The fact that this trial did not start until more than forty years after the release of Roundup, shows the power of industry and the inability of unconnected individuals to launch collaborative action. That class action lawsuits organized by lawyers are the only vehicle for redress shows the need for a public reporting platform. Filing a lawsuit should not be the only option. A lawsuit requires time and resources that most individuals don’t have. The Global Genome Project aims to provide an easier way to collect and organize many diverse individual experiences such that complementarities can emerge, enabling us to detect patterns (both positive and negative) sooner and to respond faster to early warning signals.

Legal Precedent.

1. Targeting scapegoats and creating bandwagons are both psychological influencing tactics that can subvert legal precedent. The year 2024 reaffirmed need for local updates toward addressing global challenges, from climate change to pollution to protecting our ocean, such that scapegoating does not become legal precedent. Timothy Snyder noted,

writing on law vs fear

1. , that historian Eric Foner

first

1. linked storming the Capitol to Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which bans oath-breaking insurrectionists from holding office. Legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen made the case for disqualification, exhaustively and convincingly, in an August 2023 law review

article

.

Those initiating the Global Genome Project recognized that in our current culture we assume that opposition (whether brute force fights or lawsuits) is our only problem-solving option, which highlights the great need for a vehicle to collect adjacencies and analogies in order to track and monitor emergent patterns over time so that we can initiate non-oppositional approaches to problem-solving.

The Arts (Film, Music, Visual, Writing) and Innovation

1. are one powerful way to communicate. Scapegoating was used to destroy the reputation of the talented filmmaker

Nate Parker, 2016 Sundance Award Winner

1. , who was predicted to win Oscar(s) that year for his acclaimed film, Birth of a Nation (2016) about the 1831 Nat Turner Rebellion. A lawsuit by relatives of someone who committed suicide, leaving her young child behind, was trumped up by the media, effectively scapegoating Nate Parker and causing his film to be boycotted and its powerful message about the horrors of slavery to be ignored by the broad audience that his film should have reached. In 2024

David Oyelowo, who played Martin Luther King in SELMA, committed to work with Nate Parker

to rehabilitate his reputation as one of this generation’s most talented filmmakers.

Diverse scapegoating instances, from Michael Mann (climate change researcher) to Nate Parker (filmmaker), show how ad hominem attacks can be used to block messages from being heard. They can go further to damage the entire career of an individual motivated to act as a change agent in a domain where those in power do not want change.

Artificial Intelligence Advances became a Wakeup Call

1. from late 2022 on, not only because of the surge of new developments in generative A.I., but also because public engagement with A.I. led to recognizing that A.I. can become a mirror, reflecting human weakness and can also offer warnings that we need to hear. A.I. can enable a surge of creativity that can potentially become a force for equity, harnessing

collaborative intelligence

, the collaboration of humans and A.I. in a continual feedback loop such that A.I. makes no decisions without humans in the loop.

But A.I. can also be a tool for scapegoating. Lizzie Wolkovich’s manuscript was rejected by Nature because one human reviewer said, “It appears that ChatGPT wrote this manuscript.” ChatGPT offers an easy way to accuse a scientist of scientific fraud and a hard-to-refute tool for scapegoating. Despite proving that her paper was not written by ChatGPT, Wolkovich’s reputation was tarnished and Nature rejected her paper.

Equity – Hearing Diverse Voices

Edward Bernays, who launched his career rallying American public opinion behind entering World War I., in 1928 shifted to apply his “art of propaganda” and he became known as the “father of modern public relations.” Bernays was retained by the American Tobacco Company to convince women to smoke. Vera Sharav, Holocaust survivor, recalls the backstory of the recent film, “Thank you for smoking.” Bernays, a mind control expert, exploited women’s memories of the suffrage movement, cleverly choosing equality as the basis for his campaign of deceit. He convinced ten fashionable women, including his own secretary, that they were “lighting torches of freedom” toward improving the status of women by smoking as they marched down Fifth Avenue in the 1929 Easter Day parade. They lit up cigarettes as a symbol of their liberation.

This story made the front page of the NY Times, persuading many other women to take up smoking, to the detriment of their health and the benefit of Bernays’ client, American Tobacco Company.

December 6, 2023 marked the Centenary of the U.S. Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) with little fanfare. ERA has still not passed one hundred years later. In the United States under President Biden, women raise 2.2% of  funding, while men raise 97.8%. Either men are 48+ times smarter and more capable than women, or something is wrong.

Many women have experienced career setbacks where a single man could block a woman from getting her Ph.D., block her book or paper from being published, block her from being credited for her work. And yet in 2024 it remained extremely difficult to pool these experiences to see patterns and to enable collaborative action. Women in 2024 were given no other option than to hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit in isolation, which most cannot afford, and they are stigmatized if they do so. The backlash for exposing means that most women do not expose.

Learning from History – Freedom of Inquiry | Freedom of Speech

By 2024 mob violence and polarization had reached such extremes that the election of 2024 was compared to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, prompting many to wonder whether the U.S. was heading toward another civil war.

Historical comparisons show that profiteers use similar scapegoating techniques in varied domains, from the fossil fuels industry to the slave trade. There are striking parallels between the scapegoating of abolitionist editor Elijah Parish Lovejoy (1830s) and other instances of scapegoating. In the case of Lovejoy, slaveholding profiteers targeted Lovejoy as their scapegoat to make all other abolitionists afraid to speak out. Events of 1836 – 1838 illustrate scapegoating techniques similar to those used today.

These events launched Abraham Lincoln’s path to the White House. On a cold winter day in Illinois, January 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln delivered his first major public speech, known as his Lyceum Address. In this speech Lincoln’s ability to predict went beyond seeing ominous signs of Civil War to uncannily forewarning humanity of the threats of 2024.

Two recent murders inspired Lincoln’s speech, both committed by angry mobs of white men. The first was the lynching of Francis McIntosh, a free black man who had committed no crime before he was attacked, first by an angry policeman, then by a mob in St. Louis in 1836. The second was the murder of a white newspaper editor, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, who spoke out, deploring the heinous murder of Francis McIntosh. A mob of white men donned top hats and swallow tail coats to feign respectability when they murdered Lovejoy on November 7, 1837 in Alton, Illinois (Lincoln’s home state, supposedly a free state) across the river from St. Louis.

These two scapegoats, first a black man, whose murder triggered the second murder of a white man, moved Lincoln to wonder how he could address the evil of slavery and showed that even a white man who spoke out against slavery paid with his life, which meant that debate, the foundation of democracy, was itself at risk. Twenty-eight-year-old Abraham Lincoln in his Lyceum Address asked his audience:

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of the times.

Lincoln’s omen then has reared its ugly head again. The January 6, 2021 Attack on the Capitol was compared by Congressman Jamie Raskin to the mob attack on The Alton Observer when Elijah Parish Lovejoy was murdered. 

Propaganda Bandwagons vs. Individual Critical Thinking
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark noted that “if we’ve been bamboozled long enough, . . . we’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

Successful advertising creates a bandwagon effect to make a brand or actor or candidate popular. Sometimes a bandwagon, a great surge of support, is a powerful way to draw attention to the need for action, whether to address climate change or to value the “black lives matter” movement.

Parallel techniques of mind control have been observed across many domains, whether profiteers scapegoat an abolitionist, or Nazis scapegoat Jews, or Big Oil advocates scapegoat climate change scientists, or the chemical industry scapegoats Rachel Carson and others who expose pollution, or ocean profiteers do not scapegoat, but ignore, oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle, or women who expose abuse experience a backlash and become scapegoats. Those who profit typically start by ignoring. Later they move on to scapegoat when they can no longer ignore someone who points out that change is needed in a domain where they are reaping profits.

In Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1967), Buckminster Fuller applied his metaphor of Great Pirates to those leading corporations and governments who amass power through a “divide and conquer” strategy where increasing specialization is used to control and exploit the masses. Circumscribed knowledge, affording the comforts of being expert in a small domain, make people acquiesce in their subservience, almost without realizing. Fuller saw specialization, and lack of cross-fertilization, as weakening, not only every individual, but also the fabric of society.

The problem is bigger and broader than Fuller’s insightful metaphor. Restricting climate change scientists to work only with other climate change scientists, or women to work only with other women to improve the status of women, makes it unlikely that there will ever be sufficient critical mass to counter the powerful forces resisting change. Alignments can be created by the Global Genome Project.

Learning from Past Models

In 1961 R. Buckminster Fuller conceived the concept of World Game, a powerful vehicle to teach critical thinking and raise awareness of global co-dependencies.

World Game was typically played then by several hundred college students in a university gymnasium. The concept anticipated the Internet because it needed a persistent global online environment and technology that we now have to realize its full potential as a distributed global problem-solving tool. After Buckminster Fuller’s death in 1983, the World Game concept retained some adherents but generally lay fallow, awaiting a comeback that started in 2024.

An early seed of the Global Genome Project was inspired by World Game, expanding on the work of Zann Gill on earthDECKS where DECKS is an acronym for Distributed Evolving Collaborative Knowledge System and also evokes a DECK of story cards collected by means of the Global Genome Project platform. earthDECKS reporting, and work with The Ocean Foundation on ocean plastic, clarified the need to move beyond a single problem focus to tap the emergent power of collaborative intelligence in a cross-disciplinary, cross-problem network. GGP Reporting grew and evolved from 2025 – 2050, stimulating new learning by integrating the best of human contact and personalization with the potential for global sharing online. Lifelong learning and “learning by doing” evolved beyond being catchy phrases to drive a global World Game platform, harnessing the old dictum of E.F. Schumacher to “think global” | “act local.”

The distinction between collective intelligence and collaborative intelligence is that collective intelligence pools “the wisdom of a crowd of anonymous responders” to come up with a typically better-than-average consensus result. The key word here is consensus. In contrast, collaborative intelligence advances as natural evolution advances, acknowledging the uniqueness of all players in a non-anonymous, non-consensus-seeking ecosystem, such that of many experiments, those with most impact rise to exert more influence in the ecosystem. Collaborative intelligence preserves diversity (a distributed network of non-anonymous contributors) as synergies and unpredicted serendipities emerge.

The Global Genome Project saw a shortcoming in our common assumption that “we must have consensus” to begin, an assumption that explains our delayed climate change response. As psychologist Irving Janis noted, consensus-seeking behavior causes groups to sink to lowest-common-denominator results. None of the models below was broad enough or powerful enough:

The Better Business Bureau offers a simple model where individuals can, at no cost, file an online complaint in about 15 minutes against a business for defective products or services. Since most businesses don’t want a negative story online, some restitution occurs. But this program is limited to individuals with complaints against businesses, and businesses that decide voluntarily to respond. BBB specifically excludes gender issues and is not a powerful enough model to tackle the interrelated challenges that humanity faces.

GROUPON illustrates one way to pool individual bargaining power for lower prices.

VAERS is a voluntary Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. However, in the 1980s vaccine manufacturers negotiated from the U.S. government immunity from liability for adverse effects from any product called a “vaccine.” So VAERS performs no service for individuals reporting because individuals who believe a vaccine caused their medical condition have no claim, unlike the users of Roundup, which was not exempt, but for which there was no reporting system.

Workers’ Unions are one collective bargaining model with a long, complex history. Some have been highly effective in bargaining for their workers in a particular industry, but each union is limited in its scope and membership.

The Global Genome Project sought models that do not require consensus, recognizing that consensus-seeking collective models are inadequate for the grand challenges we face. GGP sought to develop a model based on collaborative intelligence. One possibility was to extend the principles of some online markets.

Professor Alvin Roth, Stanford Nobel Laureate solved a complex online market problem by developing an online market for kidney donor-recipient exchange.

Each kidney donor has unique requirements, as does each kidney recipient. The logistics of matching and of rapid donor-recipient exchange are critical.

Professor Jason Hartline, computer scientist working on peer review systems, is exploring how LLMs (A.I. Large Language Models) perform in scoring natural language comments made by human peer reviewers of each other’s work. Can LLMs improve the peer review process to make it fairer? He assesses LLM performance using the performance of multiple human reviewers as one way to improve LLM performance.

The questions asked in 2024 were: How could the online market for kidney donors-recipients be extended to a broader online market of content contributors-content recipients?  And how could the online market for peer review be used to rate content in such a system? How could such scoring also address questions such as those raised by the Lizzie Wolkowich story above? And how can these precedents be extended to a more complex ecosystem of contributor-user exchange with peer review commenting?

Finally, how can a range of individuals (academics, artificial intelligence commenters, activists, asylum-seekers, biodiversity experts, blacks, children, climate change professionals, disabled, doctors, elders, environmental scientists, immigrants, injured, Muslims, indigenous people, oceanographers, scapegoats, scientists, soil regeneration experts, students, women, and many more) report (both positive and negative) and look for others with complementary expertise or experiences to initiate, not just one-to-one, but potentially one-to-several or one-to-many unique exchanges? The mix of category types in the example above is intentional. Each is a tag, and each individual, incident or content item can have many tags, e.g. Lizzie Wolkowich belongs to multiple categories: academic, artificial intelligence commenter, environmental scientist, scapegoat, woman. Searching one tag should pull up her experience and show how it is connected by its tags to many other experiences, people, resources, and opportunities in an ecosystem where keyword tags are complemented by timestamps, geo-location and affiliation tags.

The Global Genome Project decided in 2024 to extend these models via GAIL [Global Action Improv Lab], acknowledging that we will only learn by improvising, that we must keep trying new experiments, and that we must acknowledge the unpredictability of each experiment.

What neXt?

The Global Genome Project (GGP) launched the neXt forum in 2024 to convene those concerned about the great challenges humanity faces. The great wakeup of 2024 harnessed “effective optimism” to identify dark forces and support empowerment of many individuals through the collaborative intelligence platform that GGP committed to build. The large objective was to remediate or avert the Tragedy of the Commons (Garrett Hardin 1968), ultimately benefitting everyone.

The Global Genome Project launched GGP Reporting to gather through its online platform both positive progress stories and issues from diverse experts and experiencers, enabling those looking for precedents (both positive and negative) not only to “zoom out” from individual expertise or experience to see a metaview of connections, but also to bring thought leaders with diverse expertise and experiences into a collaborative intelligence network to co-support each other toward achieving critical mass to address our challenges from 2025 to 2050.

The Global Genome Project noted that if U.S. legislators can pass a vaccine mandate “for public safety,” then they can pass gun control laws “for public safety” and they can address many of the challenges above “for public safety.”

But the Global Genome Project also realized that our problems are rooted in “idealism capitalism,” which celebrates capitalism as empowering the individual, an ideology that is no longer true. When corporations were granted personhood, capitalism stopped celebrating human individuals, who were turned into consumers and disempowered by corporate personhood entities.

The Global Genome Project aimed to restore the original idealistic values of capitalism by empowering individuals within online markets with appropriate safeguards. A campaign was launched to

–   remove corporate personhood;

–   make campaign donations to politicians transparent; and to

–   empower the Global Genome Project to work effectively with, but not “inside,” any national government because saving our planet is for everyone.

2024 was the year that the Global Genome Project, in collaboration with GAIL [Global Action Improv Lab], and other organizations, launched a 21st century re•vision of World Game, which started first with GGP Reporting, gathering reports from a global distributed network, sharing reports of successes and problems, to grow a knowledge-sharing network. Many joined forces to end scapegoating and cancel culture and to restrict the use of bandwagons such that advertising dollars spent on bandwagon building must be transparent. The aha! that effective optimism must first face dark forces brought three related insights.

First, the mission of starting and growing a Global Genome Project network led to asking, “How can we grow our capacities as critical thinkers so that people of all ages are not so easily bamboozled, so we are all thinking for ourselves?

Second, the potential for broadly accessible A.I. tools can both provide a mirror to reflect on existing human weaknesses and also offer potential to support collaborative intelligence of humans and A.I. agents. Though A.I. can be abused, it can also be used to support those committed to constructive change.

Third, by moving beyond the “correct vs. incorrect” mindset, we can stop censorship battles and restore books to libraries. We can stop believing that those in power have “correct information” and should choose the “correct narrative” and decide what constitutes “misinformation.”

The Global Genome Project started by identifying individuals aligned with its mission, focusing first on domains with sufficient critical mass to launch, later adding new domains and challenges such that each could support others. By 2050 GGP served an ecosystem of diverse voices, enabling decision-making to focus first on issues, not candidates. Exploitation and abuse could be so rapidly called out and addressed that issues were not time-wasters. Stories of progress became models, easily translated and adapted for other contexts. Everyone celebrated that a bygone “Dark Age” had inspired a growing, evolving learning network, continually discovering new alignments and creating new alliances.

It is 2050 and the Earth is a healing and collaborative place. That was our vision and the goal back in 2024. In 2024, I was already taking small steps toward this. How? I started learning more about climate issues by taking a course with ClimateHealers.org. I then presented this information to my immediate circles, got feedback, then presented to my larger community (ie, libraries, schools, art centers, cafes, etc). This dialogue brought a lot of action toward healing the environment locally and then thinking about how to help globally.

In 2024, my household was already vegan. We tried never to waste extra water or electricity. Our food choices and lifestyle influenced what we wore and how we shopped (no leather, wool; we bought thrift shop clothing rather than buying new; we didn’t use plastic bags or bottles). We raised our adopted son vegan. Our dog was fed a vegan diet. We rescued many homeless animals over the years and helped reduce the domestic animal population through neutering/spaying. We belonged to a growing Vegan Spirituality Group. We educated ourselves by watching many documentaries about animal/plant-based health/environmental issues. We supported each others’ talents in tackling these issues through action. We created plant-based events for the community, such as annual vegan ThanksLivings and annual 4th of July picnics.  Also, we created theatrical shows and storytellings highlighting compassion toward animals and respect for the environment (ie, issues about fracking, overfishing the oceans, etc). This community-making brought new folks who learned about a plant-based lifestyle.  We planted trees whenever we could. We spoke about plant-based options and kindness for animals to strangers in any situation. Step by step the circles of compassion grew. Now, as an elder I can see the world has become what I imagined it to be: one of peace, where nobody is without food or shelter, where dialogue happens instead of war, where we see animals as our teachers and not creatures to subjugate. Our land is re-wilded and many more species have returned. There is a feeling of harmony between people, animals, and their environment. We actually are in service to the animals and make sure they are able to enjoy life without restrictions. The trees are replenished and serve as filters to absorb any of other past pollutants. The oceans teem with fish-life. Our recipes for plant-based food just get better and better. There is very little disease and plagues have been eradicated. The planet has cooled to an even-ing of temperature. Our children know they are safe to grow and play. No one wins or loses and the games have no end. All people are multi-linguists and their mind-set is one of love and healing. There are no more armies, weapons, or use of money. There is only barter of goods and talents. There is a Ministry for Art and Creativity. We are as free as the birds and we sing and dance often as we enjoy each other and our beautiful planet. AMEN.

Planet Earth Incorporated

 

Spring has begun. Buds are opening on all the deciduous trees. The days are getting longer, the air is fresh, birdsong prevails. The high winter flow of the Sacramento River has begun to subside. I sit on my porch embracing, collecting, and soaking in the feelings of a fresh and healthy spring season. The year is 2050. It has been twenty-six years since the great turn back to our planet, back to our connection with Mother Earth. I sit in my seventieth year and reflect on how we got here. To this now sustainable connection with the planet. I look back at the steps that happened to provide us with this new world of hope, life, and a renewed connection and love for this beautiful world.

It all started back in 2024. I was at the breaking point. I would go to work as a nurse in an Emergency Department and be exposed to unrelenting suffering as seen by drug abuse, homelessness, and poor mental and physical health. My heart would break caring for all these people. When not working, I completed schoolwork for my master’s in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at California Institute of Integral studies. I was a new student in the program, and this first semester was a shocker. The earth was at its breaking point. I heard the cry of the planet as its resources were being sucked dry. I communed with my cohort over the atrocities against our species and our cousins in the animal and plant kingdom. I had no idea how it got so bad; I had no hope of it getting any better. I lay awake at night, fantasizing, dreaming, of what could be done. I thought of the money I had saved up for retirement, that the way things were going I would not be alive to retire. What was the point of this money earning dividends invested in the very corporations that were destroying this planet? I was a part of this problem.

One night I realized, enough is enough. Nothing is going to happen unless I make it happen.

The next day, I began the start of Planet Earth Incorporated. Incorporated because this company was going to be the start of a united force to turn around this catastrophic trajectory that doomed us. I pulled out my retirement funds and invested them in what I began to see as the hope for the planet. I bought five acres of land. I hired an architect and a contractor to build a small planet friendly home that consisted of only the basics needed. I worked with these people on a sound sustainable structure using green materials or materials that were available elsewhere and only slightly used. South facing windows allowed in light during the winter months, tile floors released heat back slowly to the home, a composting toilet negated the need for a sewer system and the research was done to reuse the human use we made. Rain catchment devices were utilized. A garden was established that supplied us with more vegetables and fruit than we could ever use! Bee hives toward the back of the property provided the pollinators that the plants needed and the extra benefit of honey. There is an ample chicken run that provided eggs and comic relief as these funny feathered creatures demonstrated the source of phrases such as “hen house” and “pecking order.”

We met neighbors. We exchanged vegetables. We had gatherings with music and social interactions. We invited the local schools to come and tour the land and take home seedlings to their homes. We went into town with excess produce and offered these to the homeless population. We met some homeless kids and took the time to hear their stories. A few of these people came and camped on our land, this land. They helped with the harvest and preservation through canning and drying. We bought additional acreage. We built this and the people came. Planet Earth Incorporated began to grow out into the surrounding area. We provided resources to help people to become self-sufficient. We met with people who needed help to build their own eco-friendly homes. We offered classes on gardening, green building, and foraging. People wanted to take their investments in the stock market and invest it in Planet Incorporated. Here they saw what their money was building on, hope for the future.

As the years progressed, the town became more self-sufficient and turned towards the local people who were providing them with the food that they needed. The gatherings became larger and more diverse and the connection between the people and the land became more apparent and more important. We learned the importance of holding each other up, we learned to help the people who needed help so that they too could thrive. As more communities read about what was going on up here, more people followed. As more and more people pulled their money out from the hands of large corporations, the larger industries began to collapse. We told them that we do not need their products, their shale oil, their greed, and their disregard for all species of this world. The workers from the oil fields, the manufacturing companies, and the mega supermarkets, returned home. They returned home back to communities that needed their help in rebuilding infrastructure that valued the health and safety of everyone. They became apiculturists, farmers, and musicians. They worked with their hands and learned to laugh again.

All around, people lived where they lived. They rode bikes to get into town. They met their neighbors. They put down their phones and instead picked radishes and apples. The military lost focus. How could they wage war when they were no longer protecting their claims to the Earth’s resources? This became a grand homecoming that spread all over the Earth. Each person returned to their own. They reestablished their connection to the planet and to their local communities.

Night has fallen. The sound of crickets and frogs down in the creek rushed towards me. I can look out over the valley and see the bonfires of some neighbors who are having gatherings. The stars are brighter than they have ever been. With the cessation of gas vehicles and factory pollution, the air quality has improved. The nights are darker now as most communities have become dark sky communities. Most people go to bed earlier so they can rise with the sun.

I reflected on my fears from the early days of this endeavor. What if we fail? But we were already failing. We take back the money from this capitalistic society and we reinvest it in the Earth. This is how we win. This is the dream of the planet, a renewed kinship with the humans that live here.

2024

 

“$2million, Natalia”, said Larry, “and no more, to fund the creation of your startup ecosystem for chocolate grown with syntropic agriculture. And keep the name, Choco-op; my wife likes it.”

 

Natalia Zabija, new Managing Director of Alternative Investments at Blackrock,  had fought tooth and nail to get just the bare minimum seed capital from leadership to make her ecosystem viable. Her experiment’s life, and her position, depended on whether or not she could make it profitable. 

 

She had heard from a friend about this book with a strange word in the title: “The Ergodic Investor and Entrepreneur”. Someone had found a way to increase the chances of economic success when financing and building business ecosystems. “Something about interdependent business governance, profit-pooling, developmental environments, and the death of conventional portfolio management”, her friend explained. Intrigued, and a bit desperate, Natalia dug. 

 

She landed on the website of a company she had never heard of before: Evolutesix. They offered a course, the only course, on ergodic investment strategies. It wasn’t priced expensively, so she enrolled right away.

 

—  

 

This was the first time we had a participant from a major investment firm in the Ergodicity 101 course. I was ecstatic, and a bit nervous to teach Blackrock anything about investment. It was going to change everything, forever.

 

Natalia, and all other participants, relished in seeing how our innovative solution was driving profitability by leveraging collaboration. Even though it challenged her conventional views on finance, it transcended them to sit at a deeper level of intuition.  And the evidence was undeniable: Evolutesix had built 3 rapidly growing regenerative business ecosystems that were outperforming the growth of Blackrocks’ most successful ESG ETFs. 

 

We funded business ecosystems interconnected by governance and wealth rights. This made it easier for information to flow and make wise decisions fast. Collaboration oriented communication made it easier to identify where cradle-to-grave processes could become sources of supplies. With an organically steady pace, circular economies arose within those business ecosystems. Business wastage decreased significantly, because indeed, one business’ trash was another one’s treasure.

 

Pooling a fractional share of even 1% of profits in common lent the laggard and the unlucky with the lifeline they needed to survive until they became stable businesses. When they thrived, they gave their share of profits back. 

 

The course went deeper than finance to show a way to unleash the collaborative power of the economy. It went to the essential tension in business: wealth and power; shares and rights. Tenant to this new ergodic way of investing is that of investing in FairShares businesses where all stakeholders’ share of contributions are honored and rewarded in a free Commons business. 

 

This caught Natalia by surprise. Not only were investors, workers, suppliers, and consumers actual shareholders in the company, but so were Nature and business Stewards. It made good business and planet sense. She knew leadership at Blackrock would not sit well with this, but it didn’t matter. She had full autonomy to build her experimental fund out. 

 

—

2025

 

A year passed.  Choco-op was producing chocolate bars, full steam ahead. Natalia mailed me some, and they were delectable and slave-free.  Profits were up and so were reforestation metrics. 

 

The holy word of Blackrock got around that ergodic investing strategies were making their startup ecosystems antifragile to the uncertainty of markets and even agricultural happenstance.

 

Journalists and investment managers flocked to Evolutesix. Capital from philanthropists and investors seeking to become good ancestors began to pour shortly thereafter. They couldn’t resist the opportunity to be among the first to trial a new model of collaborative economics. We really got to scaling up and out. 

 

We continued our work, now unconstrained by funds, to build whole value chains of business and commons ecosystems. 

 

In just one instance, our regenerative aquaculture farm began feeding a coastal community in Brazil, reconnecting them with the water and land, and healing biodiversity. Community involvement grew around securing the common food supply. Collaborating to secure food made people more civically engaged, and abstentionism in local elections dropped. New young leadership emerged to hold decentralized but coordinated community activities like building gardens and schools to support the community and educate children on the importance of regenerative aquaculture. More children were educated, less young pregnancies happened, and more kids grew up with their fathers. 

 

Our multi-capital accounting system ensured those that weren’t being compensated for the contributions were compensated in some other way. We captured almost all the value, tangible and intangible, that was brought into and produced by the ecosystems. No one’s value was left behind. 

 

Conflict to adopt this new model was abundant at the start. So we organized differently, without imposition nor hierarchies. We embedded holacratic decision making to process tensions. Everyone was heard and considered. 

 

– 

2026

 

We knew we crossed a psychological tipping point when the media started pushing stories of interdependence, symbiosis, and climate resilience from the Global South.

 

As we continued our work to weave regenerative businesses into a united common front, small business media outlets began using markets and commons in the same sentences. The focus on bioregional development as a way to regenerate local economies accelerated. 

 

Bioregional gatherings started to pop up in hotspot areas: places already becoming uninhabitable from rapidly changing climate. These were different to the old way of running festivals. People gathered to have fun, yes, but there was always a strong intent to collaborate with regenerative initiatives. Many found the suppliers or consumers they needed to make their circular business work. Every gathering sought to regenerate the land it took place in, whether via tree planting, trash collection, and guerilla gardening. 

 

Many of these gatherings used mutual credit infrastructures to fund their ecosystem work with the small seed funds regenerative Venture Capital funds provided.  

 

It became commonplace etiquette to ensure the presence of local indigenous groups in the gathering. Their participation and telling of stories became a staple source of inspiration and wisdom for the movement. Through those stories, people deepened their relationship with the land they live from , and all the creatures that made it up. 

 

These gatherings and their imperative of indigenous representation helped chip away at the old mental models of hypercompetition and selfishness. Conversations, panel discussions, and songs in these gatherings all found their way to social media. Even celebrities were hopping on board to amplify these messages of interdependence and humanity as nature, never beyond it. A new ground of solidarity was being fertilized with truth and reconciliation. Seeds of life-centeredness were sown and watered. 

 

A change of values was taking place. A new old cosmology was being adopted by many westerners who had been working hard to unlearn the old stories of greed, capitalism, and conquest they grew up with. This was only possible because of the strongly committed communities that were being born and sustained from these gatherings. 

 

Much of this new cosmology was just a new verse rhyming with the old instruction of the Iroquois Peacemaker: be respectful, stay grateful. It came to soothe the burning souls of hundreds of millions who saw naught but pandemonium in their futures. 

 

Change was happening, but still not fast enough. It was now common knowledge that the West’s way of running economies was outdated and needed a serious upgrade to meet all needs and appropriately prepare humanity for a post-collapse world. Everyone knew it was coming; we just didn’t know when. 

 

– 

2027

 

There are decades in which weeks happen. There are weeks in which decades happen.

 

Lithium mining was in full throttle at Thacker Pass, right in the middle of the Shoshone people’s sacred ground. Years of indigenous resistance to safeguard the land yielded no results, in fact, the second Trump administration struck a deal with Tesla for a 100 year lithium procurement contract. It was a $150 billion dollar investment and the greatest deal Trump had ever signed.  

 

It became the second Standing Rock of the century, but far surpassed it in state-sponsored violence and civilian participation. Over the course of a year, an estimated 5 million people descended upon the state of Nevada to protest against this new neocolonial endeavor. New decentralized and open source social media platforms showed brutal images of paramilitary forces using live ammunition against protesters. Hundreds of people were killed. Corporate media was silent, of course; and the courts were jammed with cases.

 

The American Congress was paralyzed. To stop the killing was unacceptable to the lobbyists. So they just kept on sending police and paramilitary forces, in hopes that oppressing a people so used to oppression would silence them.

 

Every unjust death has a chance to radicalize you. In just a few weeks, a small resistance army was formed. With the 2nd amendment resting in their jacket pockets, they took up arms and conducted small sabotage operations to stall and stop the mining. 

 

The impossible just takes more time, and at Thacker Pass, what we thought impossible happened on June 14th. 

 

A resistance battalion of 500 strong had planned their largest sabotage operation yet: detonating several small explosive charges on mining equipment and transport cars. 

 

At 18:08, 22 minutes before the operation was to commence, American spy satellites relayed 3 potential locations of the battalion to the paramilitary troops.  The paramilitary troops received their orders directly from a paramilitary council chaired by the President himself. 

 

That day, Donald Trump turned 80 years old. He was busy building out American fascism to run away from his crimes, when he heard the news of the threat. In what must have been a psychopathically calm manner, he ordered the execution of Operation Glass Sand.

His devoted administration abided.

 

We all lost on June 14th, 2027 at 18:27 PST.  Just 150 kilometers away from the mining facility, the paramilitary forces deployed tactical nuclear bombs to each of the potential locations. 500 martyrs were created in less than the blink of an eye.

 

At 18:45 the first images of pandemonium began circulating. 

 

What legitimacy remained in American democracy that day was vaporized too, and the streets were flooded. That night, just America, an estimated 100 million people calling for peace and change occupied streets and plazas, institutions, banks, corporate offices, big supermarkets, politicians houses, the rich’s homes. 

 

The morning after, the stock market plunged. The S&P was down 1500 points and Tesla’s stock value was reduced to pennies. 

 

The nuclear fallout that now polluted the American southwest fueled the people’s fury for change across the globe, now 1.7 degrees warmer than pre-industrial temperatures. 

 

Within a week, the global economy came to a standstill as an estimated 1 billion people in the Americas, Europe, and Africa executed a planetary scale strike. The choice was binary: revolution or extinction.

 

Hundreds of millions lost their jobs over the course of the 3 month planetary strike, but it didn’t matter.  Solidarity flourished to fight, beat, and compost a system that failed us all. 

 

Millions who weren’t occupying streets and institutions, took up the task of building mutual aid networks. Protesters were fed, clothed, and sheltered in the face of police and military violence. Local and decentralized networks grew to uphold the functions of a paralyzed system. Children attended community schools when their own schools failed to stay open. 

 

Local networks planned direct actions, most of them non-violent, but still acts of civil resistance. Some cells grew to adopt violence in their efforts to overthrow illegitimate and colonial governments. Small civil wars broke out. What progress towards collaboration was made in the past years was being tested in the hottest of fires. 

 

–

October 2027

 

When all order seemed lost, spiritual leaders from all cultures began to call for a global Spirit Gathering. 

 

Leaders converged on a simple goal: to take the highest wisdom of spiritual teachings and draft a Spiritual Charter for humankind that could serve as the basis for a new time of peace.

 

The charter laid down a basic instruction: care for the self, the other, and the whole to grow and steward life on Earth. Native American traditions ensured this charter was built to always protect the next seven generations. Adopting this long-thought process ensured the Spiritual Charter of Humankind became a keystone driver of the next level of human co-evolution with all of Earth’s life, and eventually, beyond. 

 

A global referendum, the first of its kind, was held to ratify the charter as an addendum to countries’ constitutions. 

 

Humanity was given a choice: to accept A New Old Spiritual world order for collective liberation, or to deny it, and remain a hedonistic Hierophant cannibalizing itself. 

 

 In an overwhelming victory, 80% of all voters accepted the choice we were given, and we stepped into a new path for humankind.

 

– 

2050 

 

I woke up to the sunlight reflecting off my hempcrete wall. I looked out the window to see the town of Earthships we had built over the last decade. We weren’t the only one, but we were the largest town with some 10,000 inhabitants. We were completely autonomous in the provision of our most basic needs; food, water, and energy were all accessible in the land we held in common. We traded with other Earthship communities and nearby cities for luxuries and technology. We lived modestly and happily.

 

The Spiritual Charter drafted in ‘27 had made its way to schools. We could see this new generation of youths had a different mental model. They sought interdependent peace and were so good at embodying conflict as an act of love. They were eternally grateful for Nature’s abundance and the work of their ancestors, even if just a generation ago they had threatened the world with nuclear apocalypse. They paid attention to their land, and noticed its swings and sways: they listened to what the land was saying. They were so kind with each other, yet so strongly committed to a better life for all. They were natural techies and farmers.

 

The Charter was good for business too. Its caretaking directive catalyzed the institution of economic commons everywhere. We were there to work with a new generation to build regenerative economies that were incentivizing and sustaining local, bioregional, and planetary cooperation.

 

It had also enforced the removal of many of the incentives for money hoarding. Surprisingly, just two years earlier it had become illegal for individuals to achieve billionaire status: they were forced to give away their assets and money over a billion to those who needed it most. This kept inequality in check, and the influx of money from the hundreds of billionaires reduced to centimillionaires had eliminated poverty. 

 

We have always been hardwired for collaboration. It’s what empowered humanity to become the unique species it is. But some 250 years ago, a software of greed, selfishness, and separateness from Nature, took us down a path that by the 2020s had wiped out much of the life on Earth. This placed us squarely in a worldview of human superiority, where hubris blinded us such that we didn’t see ourselves pressing the nuclear button. 

 

The mind is run by stories. So when our old story wrought oblivion on Earth, a change of story happened in a matter of years. We needed a better story, one that wasn’t just about us, but one about something bigger and holier than us, to which we belonged. We quickly realized that this was one of the oldest stories there was. We didn’t have to recreate a new story. All we had to do was listen to and remember the answers we have carried within ourselves all along.