Can business and big tech really bend their mighty practices to prevent extinction? Explore Green Swans and the Mattereum Manifesto

As the XR protests are forced (possibly illegally) into closure, the question arises: How much our business and political establishment is open to any form of change that might match the severity of the climate crisis?

It would be wrong to think they were an implacable bloc. Bizarrely, we find Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, to be quite a weathervane in this regard, with his Communist Manifesto quotations last year, and last week warning that “companies and industries that are not moving towards zero-carbon emissions will be punished by investors and go bankrupt”.

There’s no doubt an ecology of influence here. XR and the youth climate strikers are showing that civic militancy and energy can send a signal to capitalists and regulators to act. Even if that action is only about protecting their self-interest, in not wanting to alienate their future consumers.

So assuming the necessity of street protest and autonomous action, it’s of interest to chart some of business and big-tech’s response to climate radicalism. We saw two this week which, while not without their alarming blindnesses, show that it may be possible to imagine a commercial sector contributing its share to radical system change.

John Elkington is looking for Green Swans

Often described as the “father of business sustainability”, John Elkington was the coiner of the term “triple bottom-line” (TBL) - profits, people, planet - though he has recently been bemoaning how trivially many companies have applied the framework (see this Harvard Business Review piece). Indeed he urges “rethinking TBL” - which is where the Green Swans come in. John explains in this Green Biz blog below:

The swan has long been a symbol of transformation. Think of "The Ugly Duckling" by Hans Christian Anderson. In the same spirit, the working title of the new book I am writing is "Green Swans." It is the tale of the accelerating transformation of capitalism, markets and business — a process I believe will reach a major inflection point in the 2020s.

The result will be a world either of Black Swan breakdowns, among them the climate emergency and species extinction, or of breakthrough Green Swan solutions. More likely, of course, it will be a shifting mix of both, challenging us to move the needle from black to green.

Astute readers will quickly spot that the Green Swans metaphor inverts the one that Nassim Nicholas Taleb used in his 2007 book, "The Black Swan." Its subtitle: "The Impact of the Highly Improbable." A professor, risk analyst and former hedge fund manager and derivatives trader, Taleb explained how Black Swan events typically come as a complete surprise and can have massive impact, generally for the worse. Then, often, they are poorly analyzed, using selective hindsight.

As a result, time and again, we fail to understand what has just happened to us, setting ourselves up to be blindsided once more.

Taleb’s title harked back to an ancient story based on the assumption that black swans did not exist. An assumption upended when, in 1697, real-life black swans were discovered in Australia by Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh. The impossible had proved to be anything but.

Green Swans, in contrast, are positive market developments once deemed highly unlikely — if not actually impossible. For most people, they arrive more or less out of the blue. And they can have a profound positive impact across the triple bottom line of economic, social and environmental value creation. At their best, to use the Future-Fit Foundation’s formulation, they are simultaneously environmentally restorative, socially just and economically inclusive.

But, at least early on, many Green Swan innovators and entrepreneurs tend to be dismissed out of hand, very much like the Ugly Duckling in the fairy tale. Only later do critics and skeptics see what their eyes — and minds — have been blind to. The ungainly cygnets (or start-ups) morph into something else entirely.

Elkington is involved in the UN’s Breakthrough Project, which he describes as “not just fighting fire with fire—we must fight exponential breakdowns with exponential breakthroughs” into sustainability (which seems to stretch the “sustainability” concept to its very limit -what exactly is “carbon productivity”?). And if you watch the promotional video to the left - featured on this Atlas of The Future blog - there isn’t much evidence of major corporate names (other than the expected ones, like Body Shop or the Eden Project) turning up to commit themselves to a “regenerative capitalism”. (Question: what is being regenerated here - capitalism or nature?)

We might perhaps wait for the book to find out more. But in the meantime, perhaps the next item is exactly the “impossible market development” that John is looking for…

Vinay Gupta believes that a “humanized blockchain” can save us from climate disaster

Vinay Gupta, who helped launch the blockchain Ethereum and now runs the legal consultancy Mattereum, is something of a quasar in the field of sustainable business (and has been quoted many times in this space). After years getting his hands dirty with the details of disaster relief technology, Vinay moved into the fin-tech realm explicitly in order to get close to capital flows in this current economy, hoping to bend them in a planet-friendly direction.

His latest, and biggest, idea is titled The Mattereum Manifesto: green capitalism, product information markets, and the blockchain.

Vinay’s argument - very well expressed in the video embedded here - is that capitalism needs to be as rational and information-aware about consumption, as it has been about production.

Complex and tightly-managed information and production systems pour a massive “river" of objects into our lives. But once purchased, those objects either become trash heading for the landfill, or are massively reduced in value as they head for the charity shops or e-Bay.

All the data-power that manufactures them entirely evaporates from that object, when the stuff is bought. And it’s exactly that information (where and who has produced it, under what conditions, expending what resources) that we need to inform our purchases, in an age now fully conscious of the consequences of wasteful production.

So how do we imbue our bought objects with their production information? This is where Vinay is shilling and hustling, to some degree (his company Mattereum is THE SOLUTION!).

But his model is genuinely interesting. We are all generally beginning to realise that what blockchain has instigated is a way of digitally tracking and monitoring actions and transactions in a very reliable and verifiable way - whether they be currency moves, or democratic votes, or migrants’ entitlements as they flee across borders… Or, as Vinay would suggest, manufactured objects.

Vinay’s proposal is that Mattereum can create a “universal naming system for physical objects, enabling the creation of efficient markets for information about the composition and qualities of physical things. This accurate information will let society use the same statistical process control techniques which revolutionized manufacturing and investment over the past two centuries to completely transform consumption and waste management globally”.

“We got really good at making things”, writes Gupta, “but we have not become much smarter at consuming them, and this gap is breaking the world, and us along with it.” We recommend that you read the whole of the manifesto - but along the way it destroys advertising as “weaponised psychoanalysis”, and gives one of the best arguments for an alternative to consumerism that we’ve heard:

If all we’ve got is price signalling, the only way to move forward is to manufacture all the alternatives, advertise them widely and see what people buy. This is an evolutionary “bloom and prune” approach, and fields like market research which attempt to divine or anticipate buyers’ needs are often very inaccurate because people’s self-reporting about what they want is often very inaccurate.

Just asking people what they want doesn’t cut it either. It is hard to fine-tune capitalism to manufacture what people want, and it is even harder when the advertising loop starts to take control of the process, not just telling people what is available, but actively trying to make them want things they did not previously want.

Do you really want this thing, or do you want this thing because we made you want it? If we created the demand we are serving, are we helping anybody at all by meeting these imaginary needs?

That vortex, that infinite regress, has distorted the feedback systems inside of capitalism to the point where nobody knows what they want any more in any kind of solid, consistent, clear way. It’s created a huge and poisonous semantic fog which has taken away our ability to know ourselves, because the human mind was not made to reason clearly when fed 5000 ads per day.

We evolved in a relatively slow moving, information poor environment without the written word. In a fast moving environment, dominated by marketing messages and skillfully composed advertising copy, and images produced by some of the most technically competent artists in the world, is it a wonder that we can’t think straight about what we want?

In fact, ironically, the only place statistical process control is applied to consumer behavior is targeted advertising, in which some of the best minds of our generation collude to gather vast portfolios of data about our personal lives, and use it to try and drive buying behavior without any fundamental model of people’s needs or wants, only their expressed preferences. [see A/UK’s interest in neuroscience and Human Givens as approaches towards this fundamental model - Ed.]

Is it a wonder that we’ve soaked up the entire capacity of the wish fulfilling tree of industrial mass production making fashionable junk that nobody needs, and still can’t seem to find a way to get everybody access to the drugs they need to stay alive, even basics like antidepressants or insulin?

We are squandering this plenty that statistical process control and quality control gave us, and it is wasting our lives, and killing the world.

More like this here. One of the consequences of Vinay’s vision of accurately accounting for our material objects is that it puts a premium on good and lasting design. If we create economic-information systems that support and make profit from reselling, the objects themselves will make more money in transactions if they are well-made, robust, reusable and repairable.

This could open up a zone where the total amount of commodities decreases, while people’s need for useful objects is still answered, and capital can still flow healthily round our economic systems.

This transcript of a recent Vinay speech lays out precisely how Mattereum will create digital identities for objects with their Mattereum Asset Passports

Is this the definition of John Elkington’s “impossible market development”? Let’s keep an eye on a visionary always worth watching.