New World Same Humans

Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 17,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

Tomorrow is the summer solstice; 2021 will be half over.

At these landmark moments in the year, I always feel compelled to take stock. And this week that intersected with broader reflections: on where we’re at inside modernity, and where we’re heading.

My feeling? We’re only just getting started.

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If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Just Getting Started.

Links in this week’s instalment

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Spread the word

Thanks for listening this week.

There are some special New World Same Humans projects in the lab that I can’t wait to share with you.

In the meantime, if this week’s instalment resonated with you, why not consider spreading the word about our community? You could forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share across one of your social networks. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 17,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

Here in the UK, we hosted this G7 summit this week.

If nothing else it’s produced some beach pictures that our elected representatives can cherish forever.

But it also felt a moment to pause and reflect. On the hard problems we face as a human collective in 2021. What we’re doing to solve them. And the reasons we have to be optimistic.

Hit play!

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Democracy on the Beach.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Watching the Global North’s most powerful humans exchange elbow bumps on the sand, it sometimes felt as though this meeting was the long first scene in a novel by JG Ballard.

2. Seen another way, the summit has had strong new Lorde video energy.

3. We’re halfway through 2021, and there have already been as many COVID deaths this year as there were in all of 2020.

4. In advance of this week’s summit, G7 finance ministers agreed a landmark new global tax framework, intended to stop the tax avoidance practised by techno-corporate giants such as Amazon.

5. On China, Biden is pushing a new Build Back Better World plan as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road.

6. G7 leaders pledged this week to move away from coal-burning power stations at home, and the end the funding of them in the developing world.

7. Meanwhile, the summit closed with a promise to donate 1 billion vaccine doses to the developing world.

Solar power

Thanks for listening this week.

The New World Same Humans community is united around the idea that in the 2020s, we shouldn’t leave our shared future to the powers that be.

Instead, we should come together to build a better future for all. I hope this newsletter helps fuel your mission to do just that.

And there’s one thing you can do to fuel our community in turn: share!

If this week’s instalment resonated with you, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 17,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This week saw the announcement of a new supersonic passenger jet, set to start commercial flights before the end of the decade.

That inspired these reflections, on flying cars, the future we were promised, and the chance we now have to realise it.

Hit play!

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of The Future that Never Came.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. United Airlines is set to buy 15 supersonic passenger jets from aviation startup Boom Technologies.

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3. In the 1960s the average US GDP growth rate was above four per cent; for the last ten years it’s been stuck below two per cent.

4. The billionaire VC Peter Thiel coined a phrase that’s since become synonymous with the Great Stagnation: ‘we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.’

5. In 2011’s The Great Stagnation, the libertarian economist and New York Times writer Tyler Cowan floated his ‘low-hanging fruit’ theory.

6. Meanwhile in 2018 the futurist and independent researcher J. Storrs Hall published Where Is My Flying Car?

7. back in the 1970s, says Hall, flying cars really were emerging as a practical reality.

8. DeepMind’s announcement that its AlphaFold AI had solved the iconic protein-folding problem is one indicator that AI’s electricity moment is coming.

9. The Overture is made possible in part by software that allows Boom Technologies to simulate air flow over the fuselage and so find the most fuel-efficient design.

10. Ten years after Fukushima, we’re on the verge of a new era of innovation in nuclear power.

11. Startups such as Volocopter are working on a flying car.

12. Put it all together, and the idea that we’re about the transcend the Great Stagnation seems very real. Tyler Cowan certainly thinks it’s plausible.

Time to build

Thanks for listening this week.

If those who believe the Great Stagnation is coming to an end are right, we’re about to witness a transformative decade.

New World Same Humans will be watching every step of the way, and striving to make sense of what it all means for our shared future.

And there’s something you can do to help with that mission.

If this week’s instalment resonated with you, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 17,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

Yale political theorist Hélène Landemore made waves on Twitter this week when she published a constitution for an imaginary human settlement on Mars.

At the heart of the document is a powerful idea; one that Landemore says could revitalise our ailing democracies.

So this week, reflections inspired by that: on the states we’re in now, and how Landemore’s system might just be the answer.

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Democracy Without Elections.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Yale political theorist Hélène Landemore asked her students to read Red Mars this semester. They complied, and last week Landemore shared the results.

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3. John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice famously attempted to ground liberalism in an ‘original position’.

4. Landemore’s constitution sees Mars governed by mini-publics; assemblies of 250 adult individuals chosen every two years via stratified random sampling.

5. Landemore calls this system open democracy, and it’s the subject of a book she’s just published under that name.

6. I’ve written before on how our political system stymies effective planning for the long-term future.

A fine balance

Thanks for listening this week.

A sovereign state must always balance a vast range of competing forces. And across the last few years in some liberal democracies, that balance has looked precarious.

In the coming months and years, New World Same Humans will continue to investigate the future for liberal democracy and the nation state.

And there’s one thing you can do to help with that mission: share!

If this week’s instalment resonated with you, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 17,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

Snap, which sagely calls itself a camera company, held its annual developer conference this week.

One announcement stood out above the others. And it inspired this note: a reflection on technology, meaning, and the human story.

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of The Worlds to Come.

Links in this week’s instalment

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2.

3. To jump into a Yahoo chat room and watch the messages fly once felt something akin to magic. Now, I feel that way when I enter a room in AltspaceVR using the Oculus Quest.

Time to Build

Thanks for listening this week.

We’re at the outset of a world building explosion. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

New World Same Humans will be watching every step of the way. And there’s even a special world building project building of our own up the NWSH sleeve: more on that soon.

In the meantime, if this week’s instalment resonated with you, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 17,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This week, reflections on the convergence of two powerful trends set to reshape our online lives. I’m talking about virtual humans, and a shift that some are calling the pseudonymous economy.

Enough preamble; hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Avatars Are Go.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. At the time of writing Miko has 700,000 followers on Twitch.

2. I’ve written before about the rise of virtual humans, and Miko represents a sub-category.

3. It’s the same conceit that has fuelled a wave of wildly popular virtual YouTubers, such as Projekt Melody and Kizuna AI.

4. The Technician is a US-based South Korean developer called Youna, who started work on Miko when the pandemic nixed her coding and animation day job.

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6. Srinivasan says decentralisation and pseudonymity are two sides of the same coin.

7. Back in March when Beeple’s NFT Everyday: The First 5,000 Days sold for $69 million, the buyer was an influential pseudonymous cryptowhale known to his followers as MetaKovan.

8. New tools such as the MetaHuman Creator – made by Epic Games, who also make the Unreal Engine that fuels Miko – will allow people to build photorealistic virtual humans far more cheaply.

9. Miko’s creator sometimes livestreams as her real self, to give fans a peek behind the elaborate curtain that typically hides her from view.

10. The developer Greg Fodor has even speculated on the rise of a new form of liberalism, which he calls Avatarism.

11. These converging trends – the coming age of pseudonymity and the rise of sophisticated avatars – are only one part of the arrival of an epic shift that I call augmented modernity: one of the big theses that drives this newsletter.

I See You

Thanks for listening this week.

The rise of creator-driven virtual humans is the kind of trend I set up New World Same Humans to examine. In the end, it’s all about the collision of new technologies and age-old human needs: identity, self-expression, and status.

This newsletter will keep watching as events unfold. And there’s one thing you can do to help with that mission: share!

Now that you’ve made it to the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 16,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This week, I heard news of strange sightings in the night sky over London.

The mystery was quickly solved. And it inspired this reflection on global challenges, the technology revolution, and new forms of government for the 21st-century.

Hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Do We Need a World Government?

Links in this week’s instalment

1. This weekend, a series of Londoners took to Twitter to ask the same question: did anyone else see that weird line of tiny lights trail across the sky tonight?

2. Elon Musk’s Starlink is a project to deliver internet connectivity anywhere on the planet via a network of satellites in low-Earth orbit.

3. The US Federal Communications Commission has given Starlink permission to launch 12,000 satellites, and Musk says the end vision is for 42,000.

4. Two weeks ago the IAU made representations to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS).

5. In the early days of the pandemic former UK prime minister Tony Blair called for the World Health Organisation to be given more power to direct the response of nation states.

6. Francis Fukuyama, the political philosopher who wrote 1992’s The End of History, recently argued that increased cooperation between nation states is the best way to address global challenges in the 2020s.

7. The next iteration of the internet, sometimes referred to as Web3, will be built on decentralised systems.

Star Man

Thanks for listening this week.

Elon Musk will continue to launch his satellites. This newsletter, meanwhile, will continue to track the story.

And there’s one thing you can do to help that mission: share!

Now that you’ve made it to the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with another New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 16,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

Across the Global North, vaccination programmes are taking effect.

One consequence? In their millions, citizens face a return to normal working conditions. But no one really knows, anymore, what normal should look like.

For knowledge workers, lockdowns shattered the vast edifice of ritual and routine that existed around the working day. It meant a stark reminder that those arrangements – and the power structures that underpinned them – are not given. They’re socially constructed. Perhaps, if enough of us wanted it, we might get rid of them and build something new.

This week, I was struck by two stories that tap into the Great Return to Work. Stories that offer powerful signals of what lies ahead.

My contention: the conditions are set for a new clash between labour and capital in the 2020s.

I’ll get to that at the end. First, those stories, and a reflection on the broader context that informs this idea.

Just hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment go here for the text version of The Coming War Between Labour and Capital.

Links in this week’s instalment

🎩 What Do Workers Owe The Man?

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2. Many knowledge workers report grinding out longer hours during lockdown.

3. In multiple surveys workers have expressed a preference for a hybrid work model from now on.

4. Company leaders are looking at evidence that organisational creativity declines when people don’t constantly mix with one another in shared physical spaces.

🗯️ Free Speech or Focus?

1. In Wednesday’s New Week Same Humans I wrote about internal friction at iconic software company Basecamp.

2. CEO Jason Fried banned ‘political and societal’ discussion on company channels, after growing frustrated with a number of his employees.

💸 Is Work Still Worth It?

1. Across advanced industrialised nations the share of GDP going to labour has fallen across the last 70 years. Here’s that story in the US.

2. Today, US millennials own 3% of household wealth.

3. Young people are turning away from traditional career paths and towards alternate routes, including Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE).

Same Humans Unite

Thanks for listening this week.

New World Same Humans will be watching the reconfiguration of work as it unfolds.

And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now that you’ve made it to the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with another New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 16,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

👋 Don’t miss this tech talk

I’m hosting a Clubhouse discussion on Monday 26th – that’s today for many of you reading this – that I think will be up your street!

It’s in association with Faves, the new smart social media app where experts curate the content they’re reading. We’re bringing together a stellar panel to talk all things tech, trends, and product.

Join me in discussion with Ancestry.com CEO Deb Liu, Google AI Product Lead Marily Nika, Faves CEO Tyler Maloney, and more on Monday at 6pm CEST, 12pm EST, 9am PDT.

We’re saturated by news.

No wonder, then, that it can be hard to sort the events that are really important from those that only seem to be. We live in a culture that prioritises today’s trivia over the long view.

So this week a short note on news that is, by any measure, monumental. It’s about a vaccine; but not that one. And about the nature of human progress.

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of How We Make Progress.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. In a trial among 450 children in Burkina Faso, the Institute’s new R21 malaria vaccine was shown to be 77% effective.

2. The WHO estimates there were 229 million cases of malaria worldwide in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available.

3. Some napkin maths reveals that malaria is likely to be the single greatest cause of death in our history.

4. The malaria parasite contains over 5,000 genes, making it a complex puzzle to solve. Covid19, by comparison, contains 15 genes.

5. Is there progress in human affairs? For the iconic British philosopher John Gray, the answer is an emphatic no.

Keep Moving

Thanks for listening this week.

The news on R21 is heartening. But when it comes to making the world a better home for humans, we still have a long walk ahead.

This newsletter will keep working to make sense of that journey as it unfolds. And there’s one thing you can do to help with that mission: share!

Now that you’ve made it to the end of this week’s instalment, please consider forwarding the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us!

I’ll be back on Wednesday with another New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 16,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

I’ve written often, in this newsletter, about what is next for cities.

Recent debate on that subject has tended to focus on the industrialised world. Take a global view, and the picture is more straightforward: cities are the future.

The UN estimates that an additional 2.5 billion people, making 66% of the world’s population, will live in urban areas by 2030. Most of that increase will take place in the developing world; all ten of the cities projected to become megacities by 2030 – think Lahore, Bangkok, and Bogotá among others – are in the Global South.

One dimension on this future? In the wake of the pandemic, a once fringe idea is having a long moment.

Proponents say charter cities are the vehicles via which we can harness the great wave of urbanisation that lies ahead. Get it right, they claim, and we can enact a Great Leap Forward for humanity in the coming decades.

So this week in NWSH #62, a closer look at the charter cities movement, its history, and what is coming next.

If you’d prefer to read this instalment, go here for the text version of Charter City Dreams.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Proponents of charter cities, including the Charter Cities Institute, point to the success of 20th-century city-states such as Hong Kong, Dubai, and Shenzhen.

2. The US economist Paul Romer first outlined his vision of charter cities in a now-canonical TED talk back in 2009.

3. Romer’s charter city project in Madagascar crumbled after citizens rioted when it emerged that the land earmarked for development was to be owned by Daewoo, a South Korea auto corporation.

4. Próspera, a charter city built on the small Honduran island of Roatán, opened to applications from ecitizens in May 2020.

5. The Senegalese-American rapper Akon says he is ready to start construction on a $6 billion ‘real life Wakanda’ on land donated by the Senegalese government.

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8. Launched in 2020, Plumia bills itself ‘the first country on the internet’.

The New World Metropolis

Thanks for listening this week.

I refer to New World Same Humans as a community. Perhaps what we’re really building here are the beginnings of a new city in the cloud.

The New World metropolis would lay its foundations on a single idea: that we must come together in the 21st-century to build a future that serves, not subjugates, humans.

While I draw up the plans, there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now that you’ve made it to the end of this week’s instalment, please consider forwarding the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us!

I’ll be back on Wednesday with another New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz