The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (45 page)

If a cyberattack were to target key components of the power grid and disable them, the country could be without electrical power for several months, or even a year or longer. Without electricity, virtually everything in modern society shuts down—the water system, gas pipelines, sewage, transport, heat, and light. Studies show that within weeks of a massive power outage, society would be thrown into chaos. Millions would die
from lack of food, water, and other basic services. Government would cease to function, and the military would be helpless to intervene and restore order. Those that survive would have to flee to the countryside and attempt to eke out a subsistence survival, throwing humanity back into a preindustrial era.

The commission report concluded that, “should significant parts of the electrical power infrastructure be lost for any substantial period of time, . . . the consequences are likely to be devastating, and many people may ultimately die for lack of the basic elements necessary to sustain life in dense urban and suburban communities.”
65

How Vulnerable is the Nation’s
Electricity Transmission Grid?

If cyberattacks were to knock out the 2,000 or so custom-built transformers in the United States that are responsible for revving up the high-voltage electricity for bulk transmission and reducing the voltage for distribution to end users, it would be devastating because most of them are built overseas.
66

Building 2,000 transformers, shipping them to the United States, and installing them could take a year or more—and this assumes that the cyberattack only targeted U.S. transformers and not those in Europe or elsewhere. Try to imagine the entire U.S. society without electricity and basic government and commercial services for upward of a year. By that time, the United States as we know it will have long since ceased to exist.

In June 2012, some of America’s leading security experts, including former homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff and General Michael Hayden, former head of the National Security Agency, called on the Senate to pass a cybersecurity bill to protect vulnerable U.S. infrastructure. They pointed out that 9/11 might have been prevented with the better use of existing intelligence and cautioned that “we do not want to be in the same position again when ‘cyber 9/11’ hits.” They concluded with a warning that “it is not a question of ‘whether’ this will happen; it is a question of ‘when.’”
67

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences flagged the potential cyberthreat to the nation’s electrical grid in a detailed report issued in 2012, paying close attention to the vulnerability of electrical transformers. In March 2012, technicians conducted an emergency-preparedness drill, shipping three transformers from St. Louis to Houston and installing them to assess their ability to respond quickly to a cyberattack on the country’s transformers.
68
Richard J. Lordan of the Electrical Power Research Institute (EPRI) said that the nation’s power sector is beginning to ask how many transformers need to be stockpiled and stored and how best to transport and deploy them to critically exposed regions in the aftermath of a concerted cyberattack on the nation’s power grid.
69

Although the Congress, EPRI, the National Academy of Sciences, governmental commissions, and private sector groups are to be praised for drawing attention to the level of the threats, their responses come up short because their various “what if” scenarios continue to assume a business-as-usual power grid that relies on fossil fuels and nuclear power to generate electricity that is then distributed across power lines that are designed to transmit it only from a centralized power station to millions of end users. If a centralized smart grid were brought online, it would only exacerbate the potential vulnerability to a cyberattack on the grid.

Unfortunately, the United States is playing directly into the hands of cyberterrorists by championing a centralized smart grid. The European Union and other governments, by contrast, are deploying a distributed smart grid—or Energy Internet—that lessens the potential threat and damage that can be inflicted by a massive cyberattack. Even if the electrical transformers were to flame out, if a fully functioning Energy Internet were operational across every region of the country, local communities could go off-grid and continue to generate their own green electricity, sharing it with their neighbors and businesses on microgrids, keeping the power and lights on, at least long enough to keep society functioning.

Interestingly, a similar concern about the vulnerability of America’s communications network inspired, at least in part, the creation of the Internet. In the 1960s, Paul Baran and other researchers at the Rand Corporation began to ponder the question of how to ensure the continued operability of the nation’s communications network in the event of a nuclear attack. Baran and his colleagues began to envision a distributed network of host computers, without a central switchboard, that could continue to function even if a nuclear attack was to cripple part of the nation’s communications system. The idea was to build a communications system in which data could travel several different routes to get to its destination so that no one part was totally dependent on the functioning of another. An experimental network was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Department of Defense and was called the ARPAnet. It connected a handful of computers at major universities and eventually metamorphosed into the Internet.
70

The distributed architecture of the Energy Internet builds in a similar ability to withstand cyberattacks. The problem is that in many locales, not only in the United States, but also in the European Union and elsewhere, installed micropower in the form of solar installations, wind, etc., is shackled to the main grid, forcing locally generated power to feed only into the larger system. When the main system goes down, the micropower shuts off as well, making it useless on-site. The reason this is done is so power and utility operators can control how the power is dispersed along the grid. They worry that with dynamic pricing monitoring meters available at every micropower site—alerting the owner about moment-to-moment changes in the price of electricity—small generators of electricity might
program their system to only sell to the main grid when the price is high and go off-grid and use their electricity when they choose.

The shortcomings of this system became apparent in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, when electrical power on Long Island and in the New Jersey coastal towns went out. Many homes and offices with installed solar panels on their roofs were unable to deploy them. Ed Antonio, a homeowner in Queens, equipped his home with a $70,000 solar system powered by 42 solar panels; it went unused, as did similar green micropower systems in the region. Homes like Antonio’s “feed electricity from the roof array through an inverter and into the home’s electrical panel, sending the excess to the broader electric grid.”
71
But when the power goes out, the inverter shuts down to ensure that no electricity is flowing into the grid while utility company workers are patching up the line.

New systems are now available, however, that would allow micropower plants to continue to operate even after a power failure on the transmission lines. A separate electrical panel and more sophisticated inverter can be installed that transfers the electricity flow to the house alone, allowing it to operate essential appliances, light, and heat, and even power an electric vehicle.

The U.S. military is pioneering much of the research, development, and deployment of microgrid technology. Worried that a massive power shutdown would incapacitate the nation’s military, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy have initiated a $30 million project called Smart Power Infrastructure Demonstration for Energy Reliability and Security (SPIDERS). The green microgrid power infrastructure is being installed in three military installations—Camp H. M. Smith in Hawaii, Fort Carson in Colorado, and the Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam in Hawaii. SPIDERS will enable the military bases to operate all critical functions, even if a cyberattack takes down the main power grid, by relying on locally generated green electricity.
72

As with global warming impacts on agriculture and infrastructure, where a race is on between an escalating change in Earth’s temperature, forcing potentially catastrophic damage on its ecosystems, and the quick deployment of a collaborative IoT infrastructure that can wean society off carbon before reaching a tipping point, a similar race is pitting increasingly sophisticated cyberterrorists against the champions of distributed power generation. The question is whether an Energy Internet can be brought online quickly enough to allow hundreds of millions of local micropower generators to operate off the main grid—when necessary—to keep the economy operating, and effectively counter cyberattacks aimed at the nation’s electrical transmission system.

With both of these wild cards
—climate change and cyberterrorism—humanity faces a formidable threat to its security and an equally challenging opportunity to pass into a more sustainable and equitable post-carbon
era. Turning the threat to an opportunity, however, will require more than a workable economic plan. We have the architecture of that plan as well as the technological know-how to implement it. Both will be for naught, however, without a fundamental change in human consciousness. We will need to leave behind the parochialisms of the past and begin to think and act as a single extended family living in a common biosphere. What’s urgently called for now is a new way of living on Earth if our species is to survive and flourish.

Chapter Sixteen

A Biosphere Lifestyle

M
ost conventional economists are still betting that the extreme productivity unleashed by the emerging Internet of Things—even if it speeds the economy ever closer to near zero marginal costs and the swift rise of the Collaborative Commons—will ultimately be absorbabe by the capitalist system. But the reverse is much more likely. That is, the two economies will become accustomed to functioning in more of a hybrid partnership, with the Collaborative Commons increasingly becoming dominant by the mid-twenty-first century and the capitalist economy settling into a more supplementary role.

My sense is that with an unswerving commitment, no costly mistakes or setbacks, and a little luck, the race to a new economic paradigm can be achieved. My reasons for saying so are not based merely on intuition or wishful thinking, but rather on historical comparisons and present trajectories. The incipient infrastructure of both the First and Second Industrial Revolutions in America and Europe was put in place in 30 years, and matured in another 20 years.

The Third Industrial Revolution is following an even faster timeline. The World Wide Web went online in 1990 and matured by 2014, connecting much of the human race across a communications medium that operates at near zero marginal costs. The same exponential curve that enabled the Communications Internet to build out in less than 25 years is moving the Energy Internet forward on a similar timeline, with the prospect of approaching near universal generation of green electricity in many countries at near zero marginal cost in 25 years. The Logistics Internet, although still in its infancy, is likely to run apace. As for 3D printing, it is already experiencing a faster growth trajectory than the Communications Internet at a comparable stage of development.

We’ve also seen how the evolution of the social economy on the Commons speeds up even more dramatically when prosumers proliferate and peer production accellerates exponentially across the Internet of Things,
reducing the costs of producing, marketing, and delivering goods and services. Already, prosumers and social entrepreneurial firms are grabbing a significant share of economic activity, shrinking already paper-thin profit margins of existing Second Industrial Revolution companies and forcing many of them out of business.

I am also guardedly hopeful that a near zero marginal cost society can take the human race from an economy of scarcity to an economy of sustainable abundance over the course of the first half of the twenty-first century. My hope rests not with technology alone, but with the history of the human narrative. Here’s why.

Homo Empathicus

The great economic paradigm shifts in human history not only bring together communication revolutions and energy regimes in powerful new configurations that change the economic life of society. Each new communication/energy matrix also transforms human consciousness by extending the empathic drive across wider temporal and spatial domains, bringing human beings together in larger metaphoric families and more interdependent societies.

In early forager/hunter societies, the source of energy was the human body itself—we had not yet domesticated animals as energy carriers or harvested the wind and water currents. Every forager/hunter society created some form of oral language to coordinate foraging and hunting and carry on social life. And every forager/hunter society—even those few still remaining today—had “mythological consciousness.” The empathic drive in forager/hunter societies only extended to blood ties and tribal bonds. Studies of forager/hunter societies reveal that the largest social units that could maintain a cohesive community rarely exceeded 500 people—the number of blood-related, extended family members with whom social relations could be regularly maintained and social trust secured, with some degree of familiarity.
1
Other tribes that occasionally intruded into a band’s migratory region were thought of as nonhuman or even demons.

The advent of the great hydraulic civilizations in the Middle East around 3500
b.c.,
in the Yangtze Valley of China in 3950
b.c.
, and in the Indus Valley of South Asia in 2500
b.c.
brought a new communication/energy matrix. Building and maintaining a centralized, canal-irrigated agricultural system required both mass labor and technical skills.
2
The energy regime—stored grain—gave rise to urban life and spawned granaries, road systems, coinage, markets, and long-distance trade. Governing bureaucracies were established to manage the production, storage, and distribution of grain. Centralized management of these far-flung hydraulic enterprises only became possible with the invention of a new form of communication called writing.

The coming together of writing and hydraulic agricultural production shifted the human psyche from mythological to “theological consciousness.” Several great world religions were formed during the period called the Axial Age (about 800
b.c.
to 100
a.d.
): Judaism and Christianity in the Middle East, Buddhism in India, and Confucianism (a spiritual quest) in China.

The shift from mythological to theological consciousness was accompanied by a vast extension of the empathic drive from blood ties to new fictional families based on religious identity. Although not blood related, Jews began to identify with other Jews as a fictional family. So did Buddhists. In first-century Rome, early converts to Christianity would kiss each other on the cheeks and greet one another as brother or sister—a concept completely alien to previous generations for whom the family was always limited to blood ties.

The great axial religions all spawned the golden rule, “do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” This extension of empathic sensibility to extended fictional families based on religious affiliation allowed large numbers of people to create social bonds across the more expansive temporal and spatial reach of the new civilizations born of the coming together of writing and hydraulic agriculture production.

In the nineteenth century, the convergence of coal-powered steam printing and the new coal-powered factory and rail-transport system gave rise to “ideological consciousness.” The new communication/energy matrix made possible the expansion of commerce and trade from local to national markets and solidified the nation-state as the governing mode to manage the new economic paradigm. Individuals began to see themselves as citizens and to regard their fellow citizens as an extended family. Each nation created its own historical narrative—much of it fictional—complete with an accounting of great events, historic struggles, collective commemorations, and national celebrations, all designed to stretch empathic sensibility beyond blood and religious ties to include national ties. French men and women began to think of each other as brothers and sisters, and empathized with one another as an extended family that stretched across the new temporal/spatial reach of national markets and national political borders that made up the communication/energy matrix of French industrial society. The Germans, Italians, British, Americans, and others likewise extended the empathic drive to encompass their own national boundaries.

In the twentieth century, the coming together of centralized electrification, oil, and automobile transport, and the rise of a mass consumer society, marked still another cognitive passage, from ideological to “psychological consciousness.” We are so accustomed to thinking introspectively and therapeutically and of living simultaneously in both an inner and outer world that continuously mediates the way we interact and carry on life that we forget that our great-grandparents and all of the generations
that preceded them were unable to think psychologically—that is, with a few notable exceptions through history. My grandparents were able to think ideologically, theologically, and even mythologically, but simply unable to think psychologically.

Psychological consciousness extended the empathic drive across political boundaries to include associational ties. Human beings began to empathize in a larger fictional family based on professional and technical affiliations, cultural preferences, and a range of other attributes that stretched the boundaries of social trust beyond the nation to include affinity with like-minded others in a world where the communication/energy matrix and markets were becoming global.

New communication/energy matrices and accompanying economic paradigms don’t cast aside previous periods of consciousness and empathic extension. Those remain, but become part of a larger empathic domain. Mythological consciousness, theological consciousness, ideological consciousness, and psychological consciousness all still exist and coexist in ensembles embedded in each individual psyche and in various proportions and degrees in every culture. There are tiny pockets in the world where forager/hunters still live with mythological consciousness. Other societies are exclusively bound to theological consciousness. Still others have migrated to ideological consciousness and now even psychological consciousness.

Nor have the shifts in consciousness proceeded mechanistically and linearly. There have been dark periods and regressions in between where a form of consciousness was blotted out and left forgotten only to be rediscovered in later times. The Italian and Northern Renaissances are good examples of the rediscovery of past forms of consciousness.

Nonetheless, there is a detectable pattern to human evolution, captured in the spotty but unmistakable transformation of human consciousness and the accompanying extension of the human empathic drive to larger fictional families cohering in ever more complex and interdependent communication/energy matrices and economic paradigms.

If this journey appears a revelation, it’s only because historians have, for the most part, chronicled the pathological events that punctuate the human saga—the great social upheavals, wars, genocides, natural catastrophes, power struggles, redress of social grievances, etc. Their preoccupation with the dark side of the human journey is understandable. These exceptional, extraordinary events get our attention. They imprint an indelible stamp on our collective memory for the simple reason that they are so unusual and destabilizing to our everyday life.

But if much of human history was made up of primarily pathological episodes and disruptive events, and our true nature as a species was predatory, violent, aggressive, volatile, and even monstrous, we would have perished as a species long before now.

I recall reading a comment by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel more than 30 years ago on the nature of human history that struck me and inspired some of my own thinking in the writing of
The Empathic Civilization.
Hegel observed that “the periods of happiness . . . are the blank pages of history” because they are “periods of harmony.”
3

There is, indeed, another side of the human historical narrative—the evolution of human consciousness and the extension of the human empathic drive to ever larger and more inclusive domains. The unwritten side of human history includes the periods of happiness and harmony brought about by the human impulse to continually transcend ourselves and find identity in ever more evolved social frames. These frames become our vehicles to create social capital, explore the meaning of the human journey, and find our place in the grand scheme of things. To empathize is to civilize . . . to civilize is to empathize. They are, in fact, inseparable.

The history of the human journey suggests that happiness is not to be found in materialism, but, rather, in empathic engagement. When we look back at our own personal histories at the sunset of our lives, the experiences that stand out in our memory are rarely about material gain, fame, or fortune. The moments that touch the core of our being are the empathic encounters—the transcendent feeling of coming out of ourselves and experiencing the fullness of another’s struggle to flourish as if it were our own.

Often, people mistake empathic consciousness with utopianism when, in fact, it is the very opposite. When you and I feel empathy toward another being—be it another human being or one of our fellow creatures—it’s tinged with the whiff of their eventual death and the celebration of their existing life. In experiencing their joy, sorrow, hopes, and fears I am constantly reminded of the precarious nature of each of our lives. To empathize with another is to recognize their one and only life as I do my own—to understand that each of their moments, like my own, are irreversible and unrepeatable and that life is fragile and imperfect and challenging, whether it be a human being’s journey in civilization or a deer’s journey in the woods. When I empathize, I feel the frailty and the transitory nature of another’s existence. To empathize is to root for the other to flourish and experience the full potential of their short abide. Compassion is our way of celebrating each other’s existence, acknowledging our common bond as fellow travelers here on Earth.

There is no need of empathy in heaven and no place for it in utopia because in these otherworldly realms there is no pain and suffering, no frailties and flaws, but only perfection and immortality. To live among our fellows in an empathic civilization is to come to each other’s aid and, through our compassion, acknowledge the reality of our temporary existence, by continually celebrating each other’s struggle to thrive in an imperfect world. Does anyone doubt for a moment that the happiest moments are always and unequivocally our most empathic ones?

Biosphere Consciousness

All of which gets us back to the question of advancing the individual and collective happiness of our species. For those who have lost hope in the future prospects of humanity and even our ability to survive as a species—much less secure some measure of collective happiness to boot—let me ask this question: Why would we stop here and put an end to a journey that has taken us into ever more inclusive domains of empathic engagement and collective stewardship? If we have passed from mythological consciousness to theological consciousness to ideological consciousness to psychological consciousness and have extended our empathic drive from blood ties to religious affiliations to national identities and associational communities, is it not possible to imagine the next leap in the human journey—a crossover into biosphere consciousness and an expansion of empathy to include the whole of the human race as our family, as well as our fellow creatures as an extension of our evolutionary family?