Let us move voluntarily into Capitalism 2.0 by helping what needs to be broken break on its own, converting debt into equity, marginalising the economics and business school establishments, shutting down the “Nobel” in economics, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here, and teaching people to navigate a world with fewer certainties.

Introduction

In his "Ten Principles for a Black Swan-robust world", Nassim Nicholas Taleb is on the ramparts assuming an activist role in urging us "to move voluntarily into Capitalism 2.0 by helping what needs to be broken break on its own, converting debt into equity, marginalising the economics and business school establishments, shutting down the 'Nobel' in economics, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here, and teaching people to navigate a world with fewer certainties."

"Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies, richer ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the news."

The themes Taleb develops in this manifesto are an outgrowth of his 2008 Edge original essay "The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics". (Aslo, see The Black Swan Technical Appendix.)

— John Brockman

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, essayist and former mathematical trader, is Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute. He is the author of Fooled by Randomness and the international bestseller The Black Swan.

Nassim Taleb's Edge Bio Page

The power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and 'rebooting' them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.

Introduction

In his well-received talk at this year's Personal Democracy Forum (organized by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry), "digital ethnologist" Mark Pesce makes the point that "we have a drive to connect and socialize: this drive has now been accelerated and amplified as comprehensively as the steam engine amplified human strength two hundred and fifty years ago. Just as the steam engine initiated the transformation of the natural landscape into man-made artifice, the 'hyperconnectivity' engendered by these new toys is transforming the human landscape of social relations. This time around, fifty thousand years of cultural development will collapse into about twenty.

In presenting his ideas on "the human network" Pesce references the work of archeologist Colin Renfrew, that "we may have had great hardware, but it took a long, long time for humans to develop software which made full use of it"; and Jared Diamond's ideas in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that "where sharing had been a local and generational project for fifty thousand years, it suddenly became a geographical project across nearly half the diameter of the planet".

In the 21st century, it's time to "Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for a rapid descent into the Bellum omnia contra omnes, Thomas Hobbes' "war of all against all." A hyperconnected polity—whether composed of a hundred individuals or a hundred thousand—has resources at its disposal which exponentially amplify its capabilities. Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment. After the arms race comes the war."

To understand this new kind of mob rule, it's necessary to realize that "Sharing is the threat. Not just a threat. It is the whole of the thing. A photo taken on a mobile now becomes instantaneously and pervasively visible on Flickr or other sharing websites. This act of sharing voids "any pretensions to control, or limitation, or the exercise of power".

Pesce concludes that "the power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and 'rebooting' them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him."

Read on.

—JB

MARK PESCE is an expert in social media, best known for his work blending VR with the Web to create VRML, the distant ancestor of Second Life. Pesce is an author, teacher, inventor, and well-known media personality in Australia. For the last four years has practiced "digital ethnology," studying the behavioral, cultural and political changes wrought by the new technologies of sharing and communication.

Mark Pesce's Edge Bio Page

Almost all of the major challenges we will face as a nation in this new century, from the environment, national security and economic competitiveness to energy strategies, have a scientific or technological basis. Can a president who is not comfortable thinking about science hope to lead instead of follow? Earlier Republican debates underscored this problem. In May, when candidates were asked if they believed in the theory of evolution, three candidates said no. In the next debate Mike Huckabee explained that he was running for president of the U.S., not writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book, and therefore the issue was unimportant.

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS, professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University and chair of the Physics Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is on the steering committee of ScienceDebate2008. His most recent book is Hiding in the Mirror.

Lawrence M Krauss's Edge Bio Page

In this Edge Video, archeologist Tim Taylor conducts an experiment about making sense of things.

"There are 43 stones passing amongst you. It’s called the Tradescant's Ark Experiment and I’ve named it in honor of John Tradescant and John Tradescant, Sr. and Jr., father and son, who were collectors of things in the 17th century. They were the exhibitors of the world's first pay-to-view museum and they had a cabinet of curiosities set up in Lambeth, on the Thames, which much later was sold to Elias Ashmole and became the germ of the Ashmolean Museum. Not much of it survives, there are little parts of it in the Ashmolen Museum. What is more important is the intellectual move they made in the catalog, which John Tradescant the younger created and in which he distinguished between 2 types of things, naturalls and artificialls. He divided all the things he collected into those he thought were natural and those that were modified by human hand—what archaelogists today call artifacts."

TIMOTHY TAYLOR teaches in the Department of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford, UK, and conducts research on the later prehistoric societies of southeastern Europe. He has presented BBC archaeology programs and he is the author of The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture, and The Buried Soul.

Timothy Taylor's Edge Bio Page

AN EDGE—SERPENTINE GALLERY COLLABORATION

Introduction

I recently paid a visit to the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, London to see Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, a long-time friend with whom I have a mutual connection: we both worked closely with the late James Lee Byars, the conceptual artist who, in 1971, implemented "The World Question Center" as a work of conceptual art.

The walls of Obrist's office were covered with single pages of size A4 paper on which artists, writers, scientists had responded to his question: "What Is Your Formula?" Among the pieces were formulas by quantum physicist David Deutsch, artist and musician Brian Eno, architect Rem Koolhaas, and fractal mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot.

Within minutes we had hatched an Edge-Serpentine collaboration for a "World Question Center" project, to debut on Edge during the annual Serpentine Gallery Experiment Marathon, the weekend of October 13-14. The plan was to further the reach of Obrist's question by asking for responses from the science-mindedEdge community, thus complementing the rich array of formulas already assembled by the Serpentine from distinguished artists such as Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Gilbert & George, and Rosemarie Trockel.

Edge Live in London

The Serpentine Gallery Experiment Marathon
10:00 am to 1:30 pm, Sunday 14 October

In addition to the online publication of "Formulae for the 21st Century," Edgewas invited to program four hours of the twenty-four hour Serpentine Gallery Experiment Marathon. The event, which took place October 14th, was held in The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007, commissioned by Serpentine Director Julia Peyton-Jones and designed by Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorson.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007
© 2007 Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen

The session session featured live presentations of "table-top" experiments from zoologist Seirian Sumner (A Cooperative Foraging Experiment — Lessons From Ants), archeologist Timothy Taylor (The Tradescant's Art Experiment), physiologist Simon Baron-Cohen (Do Women Have Better Empathy Than Men), biologist Amrand Leroi (The Songs of Songs), geneticist Steve Jones (Some Like It Hot), physicist Neil Turok (What Banged? and The Morning Line), biologist Lewis Wolpert (How Our Limbs Are Patterned Like The French Flag), and playwright Marcy Kahan in conversation with psychologist Steven Pinker.

—JB