Conclusion

Human systems have become predominant upon earth, as a natural-cultural system arising from, and dependent upon, the biological or living systems within the earth's biosphere.

Human systems have given rise to a distinctive modern pattern of scientific-technological civilization that has been having a global revolutionary effect in transforming our world, often beyond our control and often with unintended, unexpectable consequences.

It seems, we are creating advanced alternative systems on earth, as a consequence of our human systems, that are so complex that they are quickly become beyond our own capacity for control, and we can reasonably predict the emergence of truly superorganic autonomous intelligent alternative systems that no longer depend upon human factors or agencies of control.

Global Human Systems Proofing

Human systems are defined by their capacity for prevarication and for manipulation. This is a distinguishing characteristic of human intelligence. In other words, to make a long tragic and sordid story short, history proves time and again that we are our own worst enemies.

My suggested solution for Spam is an automatic, mandatory "bounce-back" system. A variant of this would be an automatic "return to sender" system. For every unsolicited e-mail sent, one or even ten can be automatically "sent-back" or returned to sender. 

While such a system will double the amount of e-mail being sent back and forth over any given period, it will have the long-term result of deterring spamming and pseudo-Internet marketing schemes and scams from bulk e-mailing practices. The long-term result should be, at least in principle if not in practice, a lowering of the amount of Spam that is clogging the Internet. It is estimated that more than 99 percent of email being sent on the web today is essentially unsolicited Spam, and most of this represented by illegitimate or quasi-legitimate interests.

This kind of solution is of course not complete or the final anti-dote to the problem of human systems and human nature. Getting past the mountain of Spam is only the beginning to the challenge of proofing human-based systems from themselves, from their capacity for fraud, prevarication, spoofing, etc.

If we cannot bring the Mohammed to the mountain, we can bring the mountain to Mohammed. This is especially true when the mountain is a virtual one. If only a small percentage of hackers and spoofers are doing critical damage to the global Internet, it should in theory only take a small percentage of "internet" police to hold the "thin digital line." 

I can see Internet security agencies playing the spoofers and scammers at their own game, and nabbing them in "Security Inter-Networks." The idea is trapping would be abusers in their own ruses and nabbing them in the buttendsky in the process. Of course, current security agencies in countries like the US are more concerned with terrorism and domestic political violence than they are about Internet scammers and spammers, hence the resources needed to adequately address this issue just are not there. This would be like putting security systems one step ahead of the despoilers rather than always a step behind.

Security on the web has spawned a huge secondary computing industry. It has become big, big business, and anywhere we find big business, we must wonder about security.

It seems perhaps the trade-off and price we must pay for having an open and virtually free Internet is the basic vulnerability of such a system to the down-side of human nature. I'm not sure we can ever completely human-proof any system we devise ourselves, as whatever we may come up with, there will be some person, sooner or later, who will think beyond the box. This is what humans are good at--not great, but not bad either. 

he question in my mind then becomes what are the tolerance limits for Internet fraud and spoofing. How much Spam can we and the system cope with on a daily basis before we overstep our limits and things begin really going south? If we are to maintain a relatively free and open Internet, we must have fairly large margins and tolerance limits for human nature, and we must, I think, realistically be willing to accept that level of control and security that will protect the average surfer from the depredations of the sharks.

Global Human Eco-systems and Information Ecology

The challenge of future development of human systems is forging a new global human meta-system that is ecologically efficient and efficacious in the structure of the long run and the large. The point is, we can afford to leave natural systems alone. They can take care of themselves. We cannot afford to leave our own human systems alone, because we obviously don't know how or are ultimately incapable of taking care of ourselves. 

Paying greater attention to our own ecology, and our sense of human ecology, is something we can all afford to do, for many reasons that may appear on the surface unrelated but in the larger sense all interconnect to a common problem and solution set. 

It is consonant with the Information revolution that we should be "doing more with less" rather than "doing less with more." Of course, with limited fossil-fuel reserves, oil-dependency and rising oil-prices, "doing more with less" becomes an impossibility.

Let us understand what is possible and what is at stake in this process. I recently submitted an article to an International journal--normal submission required express post, double hard-copy, to Europe. This would have been expensive and time consuming.  Fortunately the editors, in both Europe and the land down under, where cool enough to accept postings via the Internet. How much was saved in the process? 

Junk mail is a thing of the past--Spam is the tidal wave of the future. The suggestion of this is that the Internet and the Internet economy is fostering a new form of global human ecology, and new possibilities for human adaptation that are ecologically revolutionary. We might call this process "cybernetic greening" or digital environmentalism.

The outcomes in this regard are entirely debatable of course. If transportation should come to match communication, and the requirements of a fast-paced, globally mobile human population are to be met and matched to the possibilities of the Internet, then we had better come up with better and greener energy solutions that we have come to depend upon. Otherwise, I think, our global ecology will be fore-doomed to a kind of Malthusian disaster.

The alternative, then, instead of people going to the global theater, is bringing the global theater home so that the most transportation the individual should need, hypothetically, to worry about, is the walk in a neighborhood woods or a bicycle ride to the local cyber-cafe, in between running their prospering home-based business and taking virtual vacations.

The other side of the coin of Buddhist economics, in doing more with less, is really just doing with less overall. We can say in the manner of a Zen koan: Less is More. This is consonant with the digital information revolution in which more information is packed into smaller and smaller spaces.

I think we have yet to fully explore the possibilities opened up for a global information ecology--surely it is a kind of "ecology of mind" that Gregory Bateson alluded to in his classic works in anthropology.

Streamlining Tomorrow's Skyline

Whether we are in Shanghai, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, London, Berlin, Moscow, the problems we are likely to encounter--the congestion of cars and traffic, the pollution, the crowding, the anonymity of city life, the noise, the crime, are all likely to be very similar in profile to one another. We might be right in saying that the skylines of the world are converging together in design, in profile, and in terms of the things they hold.

The future I see is one in which more and more people the world over will be driving some kind of car, commuting to work places in urban or post-urban locations, driving back home in increasing dense and stratified suburban regions, shopping at large malls where they will find the most modern material conveniences available upon a global market, etc.

How vertical our living spaces become, through building more and more high-rises, or alternatively, tunneling deeper into the bowels of the earth, remains to be seen. Suburban sprawl of super cities will continue until their effective limits are reached. Once all the habitable zones and areas are used up, the likelihood seems to be that there will occur vertical expansion processes as the "inner" cities creep out.

Vertical our skyline will increasingly become, as the sprawl and congestion of horizontal spread reaches its feasible limits of growth. But I think we will see the rise of another phenomenon, what I will call the "interiorization" of global human culture and civilization. I believe that human beings will increasingly come to build for themselves man-made, carpentered environments that are increasingly enclosed and increasingly controlled in relation to the interactions with the larger world, and in relation to maintaining certain optimum internal conditions. I see modern malls as examples of this, where basically entire markets that would occupy entire streets, have been moved indoors by the construction of large coverings or awnings over the buildings, and providing inside safe and comfortable, if usually somewhat crowded, conditions inside for people to walk, talk and shop.

I can see an extension of this mall into a larger mini-city that is basically under a single roof--perhaps in parts a structure similar to Buckminster Fuller's expandable glass-geodesic domes. I can see internal transportation systems allowing people to conveniently commute from one place to another within such a mini-city, and even the linking up of such mini-system by commuter rail lines so that one may expand one's compass of adventure without leaving the network.

I find in conventional air travel especially another demonstration of this concept of interiorization--people leave their cars, often in large covered parking structures, to walk a short distance to terminal check-in counters, and then taking the long concourses, either by foot, by conveyor belt, or by electrical mini-car, to the main terminal lobbies where they wait to board their passenger aircraft by walking down long accordion ramps that stretch to the door of the craft. The passenger will make a 5 or 15 hour flight, and most likely end up in another International or large airport, to deboard the plane in a manner very similar to their boarding, walking down a completely enclosed ramp, into the terminal lobby, down long concourses to the outside waiting and baggage claim areas, where they will soon be picked up by hosts or taxis or buses waiting outside. I can see a similar process developing for local and regional air-traffic with increasing decentralization of air-transport and increasing utilization of air-transport for local and areal trips. 

I think the interiorization of humankind can be understood in a relative way in terms of the average number of hours people will spend in interior and controlled environments, whether this is in a vehicle, usually a car, or this is in an office or other work setting, or at home in front of the television, cleaning or sleeping, at school in a classroom or library, or shopping at a store or eating out in a restaurant. Even fast food places that allow cars to order and then pick up their express meals provide a means for people not having to leave the comfort and safety of their own vehicles.

We may see interiorization in personal terms of the clothes we where and feel comfortable with. I do not think that modern humans are more over-dressed or shrouded with material than were people of ancient times or in the middle ages. Of course, with environmental control systems, efficient heating and air-conditioning systems, people do not need to bundle themselves up in the winter-time like they used to have to do to stay half-way comfortable. That is the point--people are not "over dressing" for any occasion, for the greater percentage of the time of their day that they can spend comfortably in controlled, interiorized settings, the more their clothing can be made in a manner streamlined for multiple settings with an emphasis upon fit and comfort and an optimization of mobility.

We may look at interiorization in terms of the fitness regimes people maintain. Many health clubs provide completely indoor facilities, even tracks for running, where climate, temperature and weather can be controlled in safe surroundings. Football stadiums, basketball, swimming are all increasingly done in completely enclosed environments. 

In entertainment and in the communications media, as well as in transportation, I see increasing degrees of such interiorization being exemplified. The worldwide web and the computer, almost invariable set up indoor settings for privacy and protection of the equipment, invites people to spend prolonged periods of time in-doors in front of the monitor or television screen. And if they get tired of being on the computer in their room or their apartment, they can always drive down to their local "web cafe" and sit in another setting surfing the Internet and chatting long distance with people they've never met face-to-face before.

There is a price that I believe that is being paid for increasing interiorization of modern human systems. I would attribute a large part of modern neurosis simply to the fact of long term confine in unnatural contexts--all cave and no sunshine makes Mike Neanderthal a dull boy. I would even attribute the increase in prevalence of a number of psychopathologies to the same fundamental consequences of interiorization. There are as well other health related issues of too much confinement--it leads to poor diet, over-consumption, lack of exercise, heart problems, high blood pressure, as well as possibly a host of other syndromes.

I think human beings have an inherent and natural need to experience nature and the great outdoors, albeit in a safe and non-threatening manner, and without having to drive miles in the cars to do so. This has been rooted in our evolutionary past, and though we spent some time in caves weaving our cultural worlds, we also had to periodically leave the safety of our dwelling places to find food, mates and new knowledge from the larger natural world. Recently on jury duty, on the 11th floor of a 15 floor building, we would be allowed 1.5 hours, mandatory, every day, and it became the prerogative of most of the jurors to take strolls in the sun outdoors and visit on foot the local sites in the downtown area. This was a very refreshing anti-dote for rather intensive episodes with the evidence in relative dark and totally windowless interiors.

Thus, as the average rates and levels of interiorization increases as a function of the development of modern human civilization, there must arise at the same time an increasing and proportionate need for human beings to "exteriorize" their periodic involvements in the world, with other people, but especially in relation to nature and the outdoors, and without the problems of crowding, stress and congestion that comes to accompany many outdoor places that are beset with too many people in too small an area. While our interiorized contexts increase in our lives, in a somewhat propinquitous manner, it seems that the availability, access and relative quality of our exteriorized contexts are being systematically reduced, and the costs of accessing high-grade contexts can become prohibitive. 

I would suggest that as a general antidote to the neurosis and increasing psychopathology of becoming modern human beings, that we need to reinvent and reconfigure for ourselves our relationship with nature in the outdoors, and to develop alternative anti-structural contexts that permit and promote healthy forms of exteriorized play and activity. Bringing exterior and interior, or externalized and internalized frameworks, into balance and into effective harmony must be the goal of any regime toward improving adaptive behavior and psychological well-being.

The Rise of Human K-Civilization: Trans-culturation & Cultural Convergence

Unlike genetic and gene-culture theories of human adaptation and transmission, historical & archaeological evidence demonstrates amply, in multiple independent instances, and therefore unequivocally, that the primary mechanism of human cultural development and the rise of human technological and cultural civilization, has been the consequence of the horizontal and diagonal transmission of knowledge between people due to the capacity and need of human beings to learn from their environments and adapt to what they learn. Acculturation, defined as the contact and transmission between cultures, can therefore be defined as the principle agency of human cultural change, development and evolution, in very distant, remote times of a forgotten past, as well as in contemporary times of the immediate present.

I have upon multiple instances claimed that the predominant process of human development has been what I've called "trans-culturation" based largely on the diffusion and horizontal transmission of ideas, knowledge and technologies, between different groupings of people, and the selective adaptation and adoption of these "things" to new contexts. Trans-culturation is a pan-human process, and though people may seek to control its outcomes, in the long run it serves to benefit all people equally in the same way. The streamlining of systems and the disappearing sky-line of the future is based upon this central process of trans-culturation, and it identifies the central mechanism underlying the development and evolution of human civilization, whatever the respective or divergent cultural patterns may be of different ethnocultural groupings of humanity relative to particular time and place.

Trans-culturation can be defined clearly from a systems-based perspective in terms of the realization of alternative human culture-based systems, symbolic by design, and the resulting patterns of structural integration of larger and larger human systems, more complexly organized and stratified, and the emergence of epigenetic human adaptive behaviors that are the result of these processes.

In spite of the natural historical tendencies for cultural-linguistic divergence of groupings in relative isolation, and the overall tendencies of human differentiation at individual and cultural levels of integration, the rise of Simultaneous E-Culture is having a long term consequence of overcoming these naturally divisive tendencies with the result being that there is an increasing convergence of human cultural systems along various prototypical lines of patterning, even to the point of the emergence of a single global e-based lingua franca, or e-trade language, or at least set of languages. The convergence of conventional cultures upon a common implicit model of a single, Simultaneous E-culture has the consequence, in trans-culturative terms of inducing global social and structural integration of a single system, and the rise of what I would call Human K-Civilization--which is a form of multi-state system of post-imperial civilization that is better adapted to the long term behavioral and evolutionary needs of the human species in global context. 

K-Civilization can be described as a global infra-structural framework of integration of human beings into a single working system that is capable of transcending all cultural differences and thereby incorporating effectively many diverse groupings of people at the same time. It is a style of human civilization that would, by definition, be K-adapted to the long run of human survival and reproductive success on earth--which means it would be capable of sustaining indefinitely into the future a dynamic equilibrium with the bio-geophysical context upon which human civilization is based.

This sense of civilization exists already in patterning that people are adopting, even if the structural framework for integration on its basis has not yet been fully achieved. It is based upon a framework of cultural reconstruction and resymbolization of reality that requires several generations of people to be fully accomplished and made to take hold in a fully symbolically cohesive manner and in a way that is behaviorally naturalized in terms of their everyday life-worlds.. 

Human K-civilization can be regarded as an expectable outcome of the long term trajectory of trans-cultural and transformational processes of human social development and cultural evolution in general. There is increasing realization that long-term human development and evolution is a non-zero sum game in which non-exclusive control and human cooperation, in selective contexts, pays off in the long run. Nation states, defined along conventional premises, are realizing that they cannot afford to commit their resources to total war, as such a consequence would be entirely self-destructive. Conventional Nation states are becoming increasingly integrated upon structural and social levels, and this process of integration proceeds at a vary rapid pace, in spite of the ossification of authoritarian power structures and obsolete symbolic ideologies or paradigms that have little adaptive bearing to the current and rapidly changing world situation.

Accelerating Today's Futures

The future rushes headlong before us like a rushing roller coaster. The wind flaps the future in our faces ever faster and faster. The pace of technological change in the world is increasing, leading to a headlong on-rush of change that inundates us and that grows more complicated with each passing year. We must ask ourselves where it will all end, and how. We must ask whether there is a climax or a zenith to the development in which world civilization is undergoing, or whether or not our sense of progress will continue without limit or end into the indefinite future.

The problem seems to be that our vision of the future as well as the sense of the future itself, is growing increasingly uncertain as it grows increasingly complex as the result of its hastening acceleration of change upon all levels of articulation. Scientific progress does not, alone, render the world safer, saner or more stable as a platform for human civilization. It seems to have been a mixed blessing indeed.

Our coordinate reference points shift continuously with our attempts to keep apace with the changes that are occurring. Technical skill jobs are rendered obsolete within shorter periods of time, leading to chronic displacement of "post-qualified" workers and a chronic shortage of newly trained specialists capable of meeting increased and increasingly diverse demands. A kind of "techno-shock" sets in with advancing middle age--closure of the old bone apparatus to the shifting demands of the ever new. In such an emerging context, it is easy to get left behind in the shuffle, to fall out of the competition to keep abreast, and increasing numbers of people are being left behind.

It is not difficult to muster statistical indicators based upon the growing increases of change in the world. Human systems continue their expansion and the elaboration of complex technologies as our applied knowledge advances and becomes increasingly hyper-compartmentalized in sub-specializations. If we compare the pace of change in the last quarter of a century to the previous century, and the course of change of the previous 125 years to the previous millennium, we can see clearly that with each decade the pace of change and the complications of progress are growing at an increasing rate. We are today far more different than our ancestors a century and a half ago, than these ancestors were to their predecessors a thousand years before. 

There is a sense too that the entire global system is self-organizing and like a runaway horse with no one in the driver's seat. It is so large, so complicated, so overpowering, that it is simply beyond the capacity of any single individual or even any single group or set of groups, to manage or control in an effective way. It may even be beyond the capacity of everyone's control, and this is a frightening thought.  It seems to have pretty much a life of its own, with its own developmental trajectory and historical momentum, taking its own course of which we are more the responding participants than the "proactive" leaders and movers and shakers. There is, in fact, little each of us can do in terms of our own personal lives to affect the larger front of change that is happening all around the world. 

And it is obvious that some people are profiting from the future, and others are being excluded systematically from it, and many even being impoverished by it. Some people are getting richer, and many more people are becoming poorer and poor by the changes of the future. The future does not seem to hold a lot of promise for genuine equality in the distribution of resources or for the greater rule of law or for democracy or human freedom. Given our track records, it doesn't seem to hold much prospect for "world peace" either, making "world peace" the pat reply of a young, naive beauty contestant more than anything else.

As we seek to envision our collective future, we of course cannot make any clear predictions. The future is an unfinished system. It is largely self-organizing, and therefore is underdetermined. Much hinges therefore on chance outcomes. A huge meteorite may materialize out of the black of the night, at a moments notice, and result in catastrophe for everyone. Though the likelihood of such chance events occurring on any given day or in any given year, are not very great, the possibility still remains. More likely though are semi-deterministic outcomes that are the unintended and therefore unforeseeable consequences of our own collective actions. As more and more modern nation states acquire the bomb, the likelihood of a nuclear exchange that escalates to global holocaust followed by nuclear winter, is increasing, while the capacity to effectively control the access and use of such weapons decreases in inverse proportion.

Nuclear holocaust is really not a scenario that keeps most of us awake at night. There are probably even more pressing concerns that we scarcely know about or pay much attention to. Top of the list seems to be the concern for rising global temperatures that are attributed to the greenhouse effect of increasing CO₂ levels in the atmosphere that are the result of widespread fossil fuel dependency. This is an issue that seems to be growing worse each passing year, and yet we are still undecided as to the eventual outcomes of this process. Rising sea levels are swamping some low-island communities in the Pacific and Indian oceans, and this trend is liable to worsen. Eventually, sea-board communities will be threatened as well. How far it will continue to rise, and whether there might be some unknown catastrophic consequence in the destabilization of the earth's atmospheric system, remains unknown as well. 

We have alternative futures to concern ourselves with, and to some unknown but significant degree, we ourselves have a measure of control in deciding the most likely outcomes of our future. We have in fact an infinite number of alternative futures to consider, without a clear sense, in all the confusion and complexity, which kinds of future are the most likely in the long run. Much about the world is within the realm of our constructive capacity to control and to change, and this capacity is increasing with our increasing technological capacity. But at the same time as we progress technologically, and as technological modernization catches up with more and more communities in the world, our social institutions and cultural orientations remain, by comparison, relatively regressive and backward, if not in many instances downright medieval. And the propensity for human violence and perversion, upon a group or an individual level, does not seem to lessen with enlightenment, but to only become worse as access to destructive technologies increases and there seems to be a widespread mass culture that centers around the celebration of such distorted behavior.

So our sense of progress in the world seems somewhat stilted and uneven, not just in the sense of the gross inequalities between the beneficiaries of progressive development and those who are consistent kept out of our future paradise, but also in terms of the kinds of institutions and things that achieve progressive development, and everything else that doesn't.  Whatever else we might be able to say about our progress, it has proven to be a mixed blessing indeed for the world as a whole.

I have hypothesized, in keeping with von Bertalanffy's general systems theory, that for the world system as a whole there is a sense of equi-finality that we are eventually approaching, a sense of an inevitable global equilibrium that we will establish for ourselves, for better or for worse, that will become pretty much what we are left with in the long run. Different nation states can start out at different points and places along the way, but the system as a whole should arrive at some global sense of order inevitable. The trouble remains that we really cannot forecast with any certainty what this equi-final global system will ultimately look like. If we look backward to counter-factual histories, we can ask ourselves what the world might be like today if Hitler and the other Axis powers had gained eventual success over Russia, Great Britain and the US in World War II. As of 1942, there was no clear sense that the war would end in the favor of the Allies. 

Part of the problem with doing this kind of forecasting is that we cannot tell what are the most important or critical factors that will in the long run most determine the outcomes for the world as a whole. It is pretty much anyone's guess whether economic factors outweigh the political actions of leaders or governments, or whether fanatical religious or other social factors may play a critical roll in the long run. This is especially the case when in fact we see so much technical and technological change occurring in the world at a quickening tempo.

There are some things that seem to weigh heavily in whatever calculus of formulations we may make. One of these things is a central baseline feature that is part of the Malthusian dilemma and what is referred to as social-environmental circumscription, especially on a global scale. The basic principle is that a society under normal and stable conditions tends to naturally increase in population growth rate until it has over-passed its carrying capacity, at which point environmental degradation sets in which tends to further limit and circumscribe resource availability, resulting in increasing death rates. 

Environmental degradation may often times be irreversible, resulting in permanent loss of critical habitat and associated eco-system resources that originally supported the population. We end up pretty much with an Easter Island scenario. It is possible and quite easy to imagine and even observe such a model of local areas, assuming that there is some degree of closure of the local system. But it is a different challenge to realistically observe or estimate the model on a larger regional or global scale of occurrence. The earth as a whole is a closed biospheric system, deriving its energy from the sun primarily, but otherwise containing all the essential components that drive life on earth. Within this system, any ecological subsystem must be considered as an open system that exchanges its resources and its biomass with the larger meta-biotic context of the biosphere as a whole. There are in fact very few completely closed biological ecosystems on earth that are not connected somehow with the larger biosphere or its bio-geophysical substrate.

To put this problem another way, the human species is liable in the long run to be its own worst enemy, or, more accurately, to become the mass victims of its own mass success, if we measure such success strictly on biological terms of adaptive survival and reproductive growth. Population growth rates the world over remain high in spite of widespread disease and malnutrition--in fact relatively high infant mortality rates, a principle index of the relative health of a society, almost invariably lead to increased birth rates as mother's respond by nature to their loss by new pregnancy. I would say population growth rates remain high, not in spite of disease and poverty, but because of it. They only come down as the consequence of a society achieving a relative level of affluence, on average, and the increasing sense of security that comes with such affluence. But it can be said that regardless of this case, growth rates of the human population, as a whole, remains fairly high, far above rates of replacement for death rates.

We do not really know what the carrying capacity of the earth is. Some have put the estimate at about 7.5 billion. I'm more inclined to see it in terms of about 12 billion. Of course, this is a relative thing. The world could not afford 7.5 billion Americans, though it may be able to carry 12 billion mainland Chinese. Of course, most of the 6.5 billion souls on earth want to live like Americans, or to at least be as affluent as they think most Americans are, and hence we should err in our estimates on global carrying capacity on the side of caution. 

We can off course argue the global carrying capacity question. It all depends upon our point of view. There are likely to be a great many localized "critical events" that occur as the result of overreaching local carrying capacity and overpopulation, before the global system as a whole begins feeling the weight of human population pressure in terms of systemic, wide reaching consequences.

The point is this, progressive development brings with it rising expectations of affluence and of health and material well being, if only as a consequence of a "trickle down" effect of impoverished people in the streets starring at billboards of rich people all day long. As the global population moves towards an increasingly developed system characterized by higher average levels of consumption and affluence, the stress and strain this is liable to place upon the earth's carrying capacity is bound to increase, perhaps disproportionately to the actual per capita increase in population itself. The counterargument, which is valid but to an unknown extent, is that scientific progress raises the threshold of adaptation and carrying capacity through the introduction of technological changes to the environment. We can carry more people at higher levels of affluence as we grow and develop the technical and organizational structures that support our global system. This has been the promise of science all along. But it is proving the case that we may in fact have more to fear from our technology, and its unintended consequences upon our global environment, than from the mere consequences of overpopulation and eco-systemic saturation itself.

Not all progress has been so long-sighted enough to overcome the long-term, unforeseen consequences of its own development. There are many cases in point. Nuclear power was thought to be the energy solution of the future until the lessons of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl caught up with the world. Americans typically drive bigger and faster cars, at faster, unsafe speeds, on more crowded roads, in the face of increasing gasoline prices and regardless of issues of pollution, congestion and the problems of global warming. Penicillin was thought to be the wonder drug cure-all for every infection, until its overuse resulted in the development of Penicillin resistant strains of bacteria. DDT in the 50's was believed to be the solution to the global problem of malaria, until it was found in the fat of  fish populations in increasing concentrations.

We know that the human species, as a single species, has become the most reproductively successful form of life on earth, probably in all of natural history, in spite of our rather "K-strategy" of reproduction. A large part of the earth's natural resources are going to the processes of supporting and maintaining human biomass and its increasingly materialistic styles of living. Disregard claims of ant or other insect biomass being greater--perhaps they may be taken as a whole, but I am talking about one single species, not only with an absolute biomass, but with an effective accumulative behavioral consequence upon its environment.

So, the bottom-line about our collective future seems to be this--there is some hypothetical multi-factorial carrying capacity of the earth in relation to human population growth and adaptive behavior. We do not know exactly what this carrying capacity is, but we do know that the human population is continuing to rapidly increase regardless of efforts or counter-measures to forestall human reproduction. We cannot know the full teleological consequences of the development of our technology or associated alternative systems in relation to growing human population or in relation to altering the complex thresholds for human systems equilibrium--on one hand, improvements in agricultural production, for instance, possibly by use of genetically modified seeds, may increase the threshold of global carrying capacity for human population, regionally if not overall. 

For instance, we cannot guess all the consequences of introducing genetically modified or engineered species into the natural systems in relation to the larger global environment. On the other hand, increased food production, in and of itself, may lead simply to increased human consumption of food without increasingly equitable distribution of food, with consequences of obesity and over-consumption for some populations and starvation for others. In such a case, simply increasing agricultural productivity will not necessarily produce the worldwide long-term benefits of increasing stability and security of the larger human system and reducing the effects of socio-environmental circumscription. It is possible that increased production levels, coupled with associated patterns such as reliance on petrochemical fertilizers and industrial equipment, may actually have the reverse effect of lowering the net threshold value of global carrying capacity, by encouraging disparities in levels of consumption between populations and thus leading to imbalanced patterns of consumption overall.

The same kind of case can be made for almost any critical technological invention or innovation that we introduce, especially if such innovations are introduced into the larger global human system without taking into account larger scale social and organizational reverberations that might be attendant to such introductions. It is similar to the kind of issue of introducing a new alien predator species into a local ecosystem--the species may become invasive, uncontrollable, and eventually destroying the key linkages upon which the ecosystem depended.

We are becoming increasingly aware in our modern world of the fact of the basic interdependencies that the human species shares with the natural world. We are becoming increasingly aware of the natural limitations and constraints our world places upon our technological progress. We have come to realize that the changes we enact in the world for our collective benefit must be coordinate with and non-destructive to the natural systems of the biosphere and of the bio-geophysical platform of the earth itself. These considerations set constraining variables in our new formulations for an alternative future. It is increasingly  understood and accepted, for instance, that in the structure of the long run there is no viable place for a carbon-based energy economy, and that therefore the sooner we make a conversion from over-dependency upon fossil-fuels to hydrogen and other alternative forms of fuel, the better off we will all be. It is increasingly realized that the costs, consequences and unintended risks of waging modern warfare are far greater and more prohibitive than at any time in our previous history, and that the gains from winning in war are no longer clear cut nor as obvious as we once thought they were. Even the wealthiest of nation states is finding the challenge of waging modern war to be technologically expensive, indeed, an exorbitant expense on their national budget, with the gains achieved from successful war-making becoming less and less obvious with each passing year. We may say that, globally, collectively, we are coming to better and better realize the natural limitations of our growth and our capacity for development, and we are learning that it is the epitome of wisdom to work within these limitations, rather than to continue to overstep them in whatever it is we strive to do.

It follows that we must proceed with caution in our considerations and eventual construction of alternative futures. We can no longer take for granted the availability of unlimited natural resources that are ours alone in the world to plunder and squander with no sense of tomorrow. We can no longer strive to be the ultimate consumers without seeing and seeking limits to our patterns of consumption. We can no longer merely invent and devise new systems to put in motion in the world, without taking into more complete account the possible unintended consequences of our development. We can no longer promote, free of a growing sense of global social responsibility, large families with large numbers of natural offspring. We can no longer consider war and the resort to collective violence as a feasible and efficacious alternative in the resolution of our differences or in the promotion of our interests in competition with other peoples. We have choices to make in all these respects, and the choices will be made whether we wish them to be or not.

Inter-Net-Working & Inter-Facing: Humanizing the Web

Building effective networks on the web is far easier said than done. In the first place, we must see that there is the "Internet" and then there is "Inter-networking." For most people in most of the world, the Internet is a superlative communication device--nothing more or less. It allows almost instantaneous global transmission of a wide range of information at almost no cost except the cost of connection and operation. Inter-networking is what people do, or fail to do properly or appropriately, with the Internet. It is being able to utilize this wonderful scale-free communication system in a manner that would allow one to network effectively with a large number of different kinds of people from around the world.

One must negotiate what appears to be a Mt. Everest of hype in order to make contact with people on the other end. Merely being on someone's e-mail list (and we are all on strangers' email lists) or merely placing others upon an e-mail list are insufficient to the needs or measures of what true human networking are about. Human networks can be thought of as the articulatory wheels of human social organization and the grinding wheels of human social history. It is what makes or breaks people in a larger world. Of course, networking is primarily about reciprocal exchange, of one form or another, and furthermore, about extending one's opportunities for such exchange. By reciprocal exchange I am not necessarily referring to bartering or the exchange in kind of things of equivalent value. It is about the negotiation and manipulation of "hidden markets" and tapping potentials through making, breaking and keeping promises.

It is clear that though the potential for human networking via the Internet is there, and that in some areas, for instance in chat rooms and in related forums, considerable success has been achieved, the Internet as a common tool for reciprocal network development remains largely underutilized and as yet, mostly unrealized.

I must admit, I've found overall that the basis for success for Inter-networking on the web to be very limited and to lead to very, very poor results. Though I've been deliberately non-aggressive in promoting such networking, I do not think it is any sense of personal inhibition that has prevented such success from occurring. I think it is a common and shared problem and challenge of Inter-network development in the world itself. Almost everyone I've known who have made some kind of effort to make things happen via the web are almost invariably, inevitably disappointed by the poor feedback results that follow high hopes and unrealistic expectations. Of course, I don't know people who are obviously involved in certain areas of the Internet like porn, but I suspect even in these areas it is much the same.

Though I say that the results of reliance on the web have been poor overall in relation to the effort and resources devoted to it, I cannot at the same time say that these results have been completely negligible. In fact, I've achieved far more contacts and connections via the web this past few years than in any other way, from a far wider and more diverse range of potential contacts, than otherwise.

Certainly, there is a broad discrepancy between most people's expectations of the web and of building their own virtual presence, from their actual realization of the web or from the web. Though e-commerce is growing yearly and even monthly in terms of the total volume and percentage share of overall markets, it is clear as well that the distribution of the resources within the web are still vastly uneven. Small "internetrepreneurs" and web-marketers simply do not have the capacity, means or wherewithal to compete with large and established corporate web-entities. Of course,  in a kind of market that is virtually open and equal to all players, one should expect a great dog-eat-dog, big-shark-eat-little-shark scramble competition free-for-all. Advertising, virtual visibility and capturing the public imagination are important components of success via the web that most people who try it out do not achieve or realize very easily--it remains too expensive and out of reach of most small business budgets.

I have of course gotten a little better at Inter-networking even if I hold on somewhat self-destructively to my own non-aggressive style and manner. I keep no real e-mail lists and make no efforts to build such lists. To me, a name on a list is not a person, but an object that receives so much Spam. On the other hand, I've tried to focus on the quality of what few Inter-networking relationships I've been able to accomplish, and while most of these tend to be superficial, shallow and not to go very far beyond an occasional e-missive expressing mutual interest and regard, it has led as well to a few concrete results that would not have happened outside of web-based frameworks. 

My expectation for the future of Inter-Networking is that the quantity and quality of Internet-based network relations and transactions accomplished through my meta-system framework will tend to gradually and exponentially increase in time, and even though this may be only one or even just .1 percent of the total volume of traffic in terms of surfing and Spam received through my web-pages. When the counts run into the millions, even such a small percentage would become nevertheless significant and nothing to scoff at. Certainly, I might have achieved more rapidly and larger amounts of success if I had chosen to push pornography or other highly popular content rather than going after "Systems" stuff, but my measures of success are relative to my own purposes and designs, the larger ways of the world notwithstanding. A pornographically oriented site, for instance, may prove ultimately more "efficient" in terms of eliciting more response from more people visiting or otherwise using the site, even if it does not say much for the average interest or moral caliber of traffic found on the web.

As a measure of relative success, we can gauge the overall efficiency of any page or site or web-system by the ratio of its total volume of achieved transactions over the total volume of traffic in terms of page views, or amount of bandwidth utilized, etc. We can measure this in some larger "absolute scale" if we could compare our volumes to some total volume of daily traffic that occurs over the same period of time for the Internet as a whole, or for some known portion of the Internet, at least. Increasing efficiency would mean increasing these ratios overall. My efforts at development of the web system framework have been increasingly geared to the idea of improving these ratios and the efficiencies they imply, though in a manner that does not compromise on the integrity or quality of the pages or content found within the system.

The point is that efficiencies realized on the web overall by most sites and most people remain low, and perhaps are decreasing overall, not because the web is growing or traffic is increasing overall in terms of its periodic volume, which it is, but because the average levels of the use of the web remain relatively low and poorly developed. As long as people seek and solicit gratuitous and vicarious sex and other forms of exploitation via the web, these low efficiencies are likely to remain a consequence of web-development. As long as people try by any means, by hook or by crook, to "beat the odds" arrayed against them in the web game, efficiency realized by anyone and everyone on the web is likely to remain below what it might otherwise become. As long as people depend upon the relative anonymity and impersonal nature of the web to spin hype and manipulate others, it is likely to remain poor in its overall returns for everyone.

My own trend in terms of web-services has been to offer completely personalized and fully customizable web-service options without any pre-conceived plans. Whatever I cannot offer can be outsourced or obtained by third-party, etc. There is no need any longer to prepackage things in terms of services into units. I think it is a waste of time to spend developing web-services as if products that can be pre-packaged, rather it is to the better interest if not understanding of the customer that their needs are probably unique and can only be best met in a fully customizable manner. This does not overcome the challenges of demands of Inter-Networking, but it does provide a bases for improving the quality and responsiveness of such networking, making it potentially more productive and profitable for all

Human Systems

by Hugh M. Lewis