A Habitable Planet for All

9 Nov

By Roland HARWOOD

*Image credit: by* *Jim Ralley* *using* *Midjourney AI, simply using the prompt ‘the future’.*

Our vision was simple: a habitable planet for all.

The environmental movement had represented 70 years of abject failure.

Scientists, NGOs, citizens, politicians and investors had all failed to make material gains. Markets preferred cheap, unsustainable energy: and society preferred not to care.

But times were changing.

So back in 2022 we realized that climate change represented the biggest opportunity on the planet, as well as the greatest challenge we now faced. We knew we had to unleash the transformative forces of entrepreneurship and collaboration to give ourselves a chance.

We already had the tools and the vision: we just needed to apply them.

Even further back in 1993 with our first encounter, Web 1.0 had promised to bypass media gatekeepers and let more direct forms of democracy flourish. Web 2.0 then created vast new networks of connected people.

But revolutions get stolen. The wild and weird old Web became a grim provincial shopping centre. Digital uprisings like the Arab Spring imploded: freedoms briefly tasted then lost. And the big social networks became cesspools of rage and disinformation.

But we knew that it doesn’t have to be that way. That something new was coming. A slow combination of advances in cryptography and network architecture had led to real and tangible innovation: where money and government and desire meet.

Web3 was now aimed at reforming the way global systems operate, how the shareholder-owned corporations can be rewired. Not only how money flows, but how information moves, science is conducted, and how mission-critical systems like a free, fair and reliable media could run.

Yet some had already called time on Web3. They said it had entered the dystopian phase, overrun by bad actors, by predatory capital, built on weak technology, fanciful economics - an amplifier of inequality. That it had no fundamental economic value, merely speculative value, plus some tasty features for tax avoiders.

Yet where both sides agreed: Web3 was, and still is, a superfluorescent, high-speed, boundlessly various, fully web-native phenomenon, humming with potential.

In 2022, it was already crashingly obvious that finance would only become more digital, and that this would inevitably get entangled with big, knotty questions around identity, permissions, access and ownership.

Crypto was unsafe, hard to use, and incentives appeared mainly to be to keep the corruption going until the music stops. We therefore welcomed the crypto winter, in which the more stupid or corrupt projects froze.

It had become evident that to effect lasting change, there was a role for government, thus far asleep at the wheel, or minded to encourage innovation by leaving it alone.

And markets couldn’t do this on their own either. Government existed to fund, regulate and coordinate things that markets couldn't, wouldn't, or didn't. Web3 was no different.

We noticed that the most pressure to move things forward was in places where human need was greatest, and legacy technologies were not the incumbents. We therefore nurtured more innovation at the ‘edges’.

We realized that one of the core benefits of Web3 was the direct aggregation and coordination of capital with a minimum number of rent-seekers, then certain new moves became possible. For instance

DeSci - A diverse amalgamation of scientists, entrepreneurs and educators proposed ways to measure reputation and methods to distribute IP and research.
WeFi - Cashmobs as the new flashmobs: a sudden flexing of people-powered capital to realise a cause. Funding by and for the people.

So we learned that to realise our vision of a habitable planet for all, we needed to build a world class climate-tech ecosystem, building upon web3.

Now if you hadn’t heard about us already, the Liminal community had come together in 2019 united by the idea of collective intelligence for the greater good.

We had been working on various international development projects, sustainability programmes, and were experimenting with building new data unions.

We knew we wanted to practice what we preach, namely to be increasingly community-driven. To stimulate this, we gave every member co-ownership tokens for developing and leading new projects, referring members, active community participation, earning a share of the upside of the value created along the way.

We learned so much from this experience about what needed to happen at a much bigger scale, to build the climate ecosystem that truly shared the risk and reward of climate action.

Yet the ecosystem was so busy and fragmented back then, and hard to navigate. Different people, organisations, language, process, metrics, and a closed and competitive mindset, all stopped us from making the progress we needed to.

We knew that ideal ecosystems don’t just emerge: they are fostered. So we identified that there were three big gaps around climate in: investment, knowledge and narrative.

We didn’t have all the answers. Nobody ever does. But we did have informed questions, a diverse network of people and partners.

So we asked them: where is the opportunity? When do commercial and societal interests align?

Together we acted and learned. We made some mistakes: but also got something useful done and built a habitable planet for all.

Now that, was and is, a future worth fighting for.

This blog post is based on a talk given by Roland Harwood at the Framing the Future Symposium on 8th November 2022 hosted by the Frontier Technologies Hub. With special thanks to Lars Porsena.