WHY is the MAP Needed?

We Face Existential Risks

Throughout the world, there is mounting awareness that we are facing multiple serious crises. A small, but growing, number are recognizing that these crises are, inter-related, systemic in nature and global in scope.

Ecosystem collapse: According to information in Doughnut Economics published by Kate Raworth in 2017 (illustrated above), we have already overshot 4 of the seven planetary boundaries for which quantitive measures have been defined and 2 of the remaining 3 are trending in that direction. We are witnessing well-chronicled global climate change and increasing ocean acidification. Species extinction (6th Great Extinction) is occurring at a rate that exceeds all five prior extinction events. In 100 years of industrial agriculture, we have degraded 50 - 70% of the organic material and natural nutrients that required 10,000 years of post glacial building to accumulate. Fish stocks are depleted. Pollinators disappearing. Ground water tables are falling more rapidly than they can be regenerated. 70% of grasslands are degraded.
Economic dysfunction: We are also witnessing extreme polarization of wealth accompanied by devastating poverty and social injustice. Heart-wrenching numbers of people globally lack access to adequate housing (24%), drinking water (9%), food (11%), sanitation (32%), education (17%), electricity (17%) and the internet (57%).
Breakdown in capacity for collective action. Technology that is growing exponentially in both sophistication and reach is driven by attention-economy business models that have created a breakdown in collective sense-making and a paralyzing polarization in choice-making.

Deeper investigation reveals that the root causes of these crises are not due to the actions of a few bad actors, a political party, or the occasional tyrant, but instead are systemically rooted in cultural assumptions (i.e., memes) that have demonstrated great longevity and form the basis of our economic, educational, governance and social systems.

The meme of a mechanistic universe has led to educational systems patterned after 19th century industrial assembly lines. The meme of homo economicus -- man as a purely rational, narrowly self-interested agent with complete market knowledge -- is the rarely questioned (until recently) assumption that lies at the heart of our economic system. Our economic system is also grounded in the meme of nature as an inexhaustible supplier of resources with a bottomless capacity to absorb waste. The governance models underlying our systems of representative democracy were designed around the limitations of information flows at a time when information was carried by and at the speed of horse and buggy.

The hypothesis on which the MAP is based is that the underlying cause of our multi-dimensional global crises lies in the manifestation of long-standing memes that have outlived their usefulness. The reason the MAP is named Memetic Activation Platform is that it is a platform aimed at promoting the articulation and manifestation (i.e., activation by agents) of new memes.

The good news is that, in evolutionary terms, severe crises create the conditions for transformative change. Every evolutionary quantum leap has been preceded by crises, chaos and breakdown. And in response to our current conditions, changes are, in fact, spontaneously emerging globally in all sectors of human endeavor. Thought-leaders are offering alternatives to the prevailing memes -- new models and practices are being articulated and shared in books, blog posts, videos, podcasts, social media groups, training classes and are being put into practice by awakening individuals, conscious organizations and intentional communities.

But those on the forefront of evolutionary change are largely operating independently, going it alone in their own siloes. Whereas the large corporations invest in and benefit from increasingly sophisticated and globally interconnected computing and communications platforms, evolutionary leaders have little in the way of shared infrastructure.

What Can I/We Do?

Those of us awakening to the breadth and depth of our crises and their underlying causes are struggling with the question of our own personal response. Each of us is seeking viable answers to the pressing (and very personal) question: "What can I do?"

In addressing this question, our very diversity can be a potent source of strength. We each have different knowledge, experience, short-comings, skills, capacities and weaknesses to draw upon, offering a diverse range of responses.

Nevertheless, each of us is hampered as a result of still being infected to varying degrees by the memes of the current prevailing (though failing) culture. And, when facing challenging circumstances, we too often react from the pain of some individual or collective past trauma rather than respond from a place of deep presence. Effective action depends upon liberating ourselves from these hidden (unconscious) inner influencers as well as healing from our personal and collective traumas. In short, in the words of Ken Wilber, we are being called upon to do the tough inner work of Waking Up, Growing Up, and Cleaning Up in order to unlock our capacity for Showing Up to drive effective action in the world.

And yet even this demanding personal work, though vitally necessary, is insufficient. The global scope of our crises demands coordinated action at global levels. Individual action is not enough -- an unprecedented degree of human cooperation is required. Beyond the question of "what can I do?" looms the question, "What can we do?"

These very questions fueled my own soul-searching. Most of my 30+ year career as a software developer and software, platform and enterprise architect had been devoted to helping high-tech companies improve their competitive posture, agility, and responsiveness. I was the technical lead for distributed relational database products at Burroughs Advanced Systems Group and later VP of Engineering for an object oriented database startup in the 1980's. In the 1990's, I contributed to the architecture, implementation, and use of various large-scale distributed computing platforms at a telecommunications company (U S WEST). In 1999, I joined Sun Microsystems as Development Manager and Chief Architect for their new Online Support Center, spear-heading their shift from phone-centric to web-centric customer support. Later I led Sun's Enterprise Architecture team before forming and leading an Integrated Solution Design team responsible for the overall Solution Architecture of what is believed to be one of the largest CRM/ERP implementations of the Oracle eBusiness Suite ever attempted (1,000+ project team members, ~275 business processes impacted, 500+ applications replaced). I joined Oracle Corporation upon its acquisition of Sun in 2010, managing evolution of the functional, technical and deployment architecture for a portfolio of internally developed applications supporting Oracle’s $18B Services business. As lead architect for the Customer File Management project I helped streamline the management and secure handling of information collected from customer systems and enabled Oracle to achieve certification as a HIPAA Business Associate.

Yet throughout this period I also became increasingly aware of the mounting interconnected global crises. At the Institute of Noetic Sciences 2015 conference, the following lines in Drew Dillenger's recital of his poem Hieroglyphic Stairway pierced me to the heart:

it's 3:23 in the morning and I'm awake because my great great grandchildren won't let me sleep my great great grandchildren ask me in dreams what did you do while the planet was plundered? what did you do when the earth was unraveling?

surely you did something when the seasons started failing?
as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest when democracy was stolen?
what did you do once you knew?

In that instant, I knew I simply had no choice but to devote the remainder of my life to addressing that question. But the majority of my experience was in Fortune 500 companies. Such companies are major drivers and beneficiaries of the current culture and cannot be expected to be the vanguard for fundamental change. They are too invested in the status quo. How was my corporate experience relevant to those pioneers on the forefront of cultural transformation? What can I do?

Exploring the questions of "what can I do?" and "what can we do?", led to a new set of questions:

Instead of a platform for large corporations, what if there were a platform of comparable power, sophistication and reach, but serving the interconnected community of evolutionary change agents -- a platform for the unplatformed?
Could I leverage my experience in creating distributed computing platforms to empower the emerging bottoms-up, self-organizing movement?
Could we invert the asymmetric power dynamics?
What can evolution teach us about how to overcome the barriers to cooperation?
What can living systems teach us about principles of agency and agent interactions?

As I considered these and similar questions, a vision began to emerge of a Memetic Activation Platform (MAP) and how it could be used to support journeys of transformation leading to global civilizational change.

Yes... this is a ridiculously ambitious goal. I sometimes joke that solving Climate Change and World Hunger wasn't hard enough... I needed a real challenge! Unfortunately, when dealing with multiple, systemic (which is to say inter-connected) global challenges, anything less than a global holistic approach seems doomed to failure. So... global civilizational transformation appears to be what is demanded of us.

To be clear, this does NOT mean that I've figured it all out or that I have THE Answer. Quite the opposite. A fundamental tenet is that when dealing with emergence within complex systems, NO ONE can possibly have THE answer. Instead, the hope is that by amplifying the reach and agency of the many, many creative innovative individuals who have AN answer and fostering co-creative collaborations, organizations and their interconnection, the MAP can help support the evolutionary processes by which workable solutions can emerge and evolve at global scale.

To Delve Deeper...

To dig deeper into the systemic nature and global scope of our multi-dimensional crises:

On the need for global shift in culture as the path out of our self-terminating trajectory:

Roger P. Briggs in Emerging World: The Evolution of Consciousness and the Future of Humanity, draws on paleoanthropology, cultural philosophy, cognitive psychology, and evolutionary theory to make the case that humanity is on the verge of a major transformation

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Last updated 1 year ago