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 16,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This week, I go deep on an intriguing experiment that never was. And what it tells us about the relationship between technology, climate change, and politics in the 2020s.

Hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #60.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. A few days ago a solar bioengineering experiment due to take place at Kiruna, northern Sweden, was cancelled.

2. The phrase technological solutionism was coined by the technology thinker Evgeny Morozov.

3. Lonely old people? Give them a robot.

4. Pandemic has caused a mental health crisis? Here’s an AI-fuelled counsellor.

5.

6. LSE academic Jason Hickel other degrowthers argue that, on our current path, it’s near impossible to transition away from fossil fuels fast enough to avoid catastrophic warming.

Growth Mindset

Thanks for listening this week.

If this week’s instalment struck a chord, please consider forwarding the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share this across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember, the larger and more diverse the New World Same Humans 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 🚀🔮

As lockdown eases here in the UK, a transition is on the horizon. We’re about to find out what the new normal looks like when it comes to work.

The picture is still unclear. Last week the prime minister urged UK citizens to get back to the office, saying they’d had enough ‘days off’ during lockdown. Meanwhile one of the country’s largest financial institutions, Nationwide, told its 13,000 employees that they’re permanently free to ‘work from anywhere’.

Two starkly different visions, then, of work in the 2020s. The same tension will no doubt afflict industrialised nations around the world.

Many employers, though, are converging on a settlement: a mixed model that will see staff in the office occasionally, and free to work anywhere for the rest of the time. That sounds a balanced compromise; it’s also a revolution. One that will have far-reaching effects on the way we live, how we do innovation, and the nature of citizenship.

So this week, notes on the transition towards remote work. I’ve examined the shift across four key dimensions:

* Cities

* Education

* Creativity and innovation

* Citizens and states

For each dimension, I’ve devised a short scenario built on a number of key predictions. In some future instalment of NWSH – I’m thinking 2025 at the earliest – I’ll revisit the claims I make this week. Each scenario features one tweet, chosen because it is a powerful illustration of one of the seeds, already growing in 2021, of my imagined future.

A final note: these scenarios are undeniably focused on rich, industrialised nations where office work is predominant and many can work from home. The World Bank estimates that in low income countries only one in every 26 jobs can be done remotely. Those countries, clearly, will travel different paths, and I hope to write about that in a later instalment.

Enough preamble; hit play!

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #59.

Links in this week’s instalment

🏙️ Cities

1. See these automated stores from Swedish retail brand Lifvs.

2. Artists, writers, and actors put unused commercial and retail space to new and innovative use.

3. The mayor of Miami used used Twitter banter to sell his city as an alternative to Silicon Valley during the pandemic.

4. The later 2020s sees a new wave of charismatic founders establish charter cities: independent city states intended to attract itinerant knowledge workers and reimagine government for the 21st-century.

5.

🎓 Education

1. Superstar academics look to break away and monetise their huge audiences, leveraging tools such this new creator platform for academics.

2.

💡 Creativity and Innovation

1. A now canonical study by the MIT Human Dynamics Laboratory found that communication is what sets the best teams apart.

2.

🧑‍💻 Citizens and States

* At the intersection of much of the change discussed here is a single, powerful phenomenon. That is, the emergence of the Sovereign Individual.

*

Share Your Screen

Thanks for listening this week! One last request…

If this week’s instalment struck a chord, please consider forwarding the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share this across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable.

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 🚀🔮

Here in the UK, this week marks one year since the start of the first coronavirus lockdown.

Time, then, to reflect. A note this week on what we know must change: about our relationship with markets, growth, and government. And why it’s time to reclaim an old, politically charged phrase: there is no alternative.

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #58.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Oxfam says that without government intervention it will take over a decade for the number of people living in poverty worldwide to return to pre-pandemic levels.

2. Forbes says the world’s 10 richest people increased their wealth by a combined half a trillion US dollars in 2020.

3. The International Energy Agency says carbon emissions have now rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.

4. Margaret Thatcher said of her programme of deregulation: there is no alternative.

5. Rising political theorist Will Davies has called for a generation of ‘legal and economic rebuilders’ to create new structures for the decades ahead.

6. This recent paper, The Mutualist Economy: A New Deal for Ownership, by Nils Gilman and Yakov Feygin from think tank the Berggruen Institute proposes a new social contact for a world of automation.

7. Economist Mariana Mazzucato is drawing the outlines of a new relationship between government, enterprise, and innovation.

Make It New

Thanks for listening this week.

New World Same Humans is a community founded on one principle: that we shouldn’t leave our shared future to the powers that be. Instead, we should help build it.

Our amazing community of founders, designers, technologists, researchers, policy makers and more continues to grow. Let’s keep that going!

If this week’s instalment struck a chord, please consider forwarding the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share this across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. See you then,

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, how the pandemic pushed us deeper inside our troubled relationship with technoconsumerism. And the emergence of a new way to fight back.

Hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #57.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Facebook saw daily users increase by 12% in 2020.

2. Amazon’s net profits rose by 84%.

3. Netflix signed up 26 million new paid subscribers in the first half of the year, against 28 million for the whole of 2019.

4. A global survey conducted by polling company Ipsos just before the pandemic found that concern over the way companies use our data had risen by 8% since 2013.

5. Data Leverage: A Framework for Empowering the Public in its Relationship with Technology Companies asks what ordinary people can do to win back some of the power being amassed by the big digital platforms.

6. A few years ago coder and technologist Daniel Howe and others created AdNauseum, a browser plugin that blocks but simultaneously clicks on every online ad served by a web browser.

7. A recent research paper concluded that AdNauseum works, and defended it against the accusation that by making advertising impossible it will lead to the demise of free content on the web.

8. Alias is a device that sits on top of a smart speaker and continually ‘whispers’ a stream of inaudible static to it so that the device can’t eavesdrop on those around it.

Activate This

Thanks for reading this week!

If this week’s instalment struck a chord, please consider forwarding the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share this across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. See you then,

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 Wednesday in New Week #25 I wrote about Stockton’s recent experiment with a Universal Basic Income.

Stockton is a small city in California, not far from Silicon Valley. Despite bordering such wealth, it’s one of the poorest in the country; 25% of its 310,000 inhabitants live below the poverty line. Boarded up homes and shops are commonplace; the city was ravaged by the 2008 housing crisis and never recovered.

For two years starting in 2018, 125 low-income families were sent $500 a month no strings attached.

The results are now in. Recipients paid down credit card debt, spent on food and essentials, and worked more than those in a control group who received no UBI. All while reporting improved physical and emotional wellbeing.

Interesting in its own right. But it’s the wider context here that makes all this so urgent. Fuelled by massive cash payments to citizens during the pandemic, a wave of job destruction, and a radical new economic theory, the conversation about UBI has moved to a new place.

UBI is set to be one of the defining issues of the coming decade. So this week: where is the argument at now? What lies ahead? And is UBI, as critics claim, nothing more than an empty dream? Or can it be a practical path to a world that is fairer and more free?

Go ahead: hit play!

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #56.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. In the UK some members of the legendary Beveridge Committee, whose recommendations led to the creation of the modern welfare state in 1945, floated ideas that sounded much like a UBI.

2. Dutch historian Rutger Bregman has written on how close President Nixon was to enacting an unconditional income of $1,600 a year – around $12,000 in today’s money – for every poor family.

3. See the results of the recent Stockton experiment on UBI.

4. A recent large-scale trial in Finland, which saw 2,000 people receive EUR 560 per month, came to similar conclusions.

5. In 2016 Democratic presidential race, Andrew Yang proposed a ‘freedom dividend’ of $1,000 a month for every adult.

6. Today, Yang is standing for mayor of NYC; his proposal for an unconditional income for the city’s poorest 500,000 seems standard, even relatively tame.

7. A Pew Research poll in August 2020 found US citizens under 30 were two to one in favour of a UBI.

8. A 2019 British study found that a £60 a week UBI for every adult in the UK would cost £28 billion and return UK spending on benefits to 2010 levels.

9. South Korean politician Lee Jae-myung, who supports a basic income, suggests new taxes on carbon emissions and digital services to help pay the bill.

10. A controversial new theory called Modern Monetary Theory says that we’ve long misunderstood the nature of government debt.

11. Superstar futurist Yuval Harari says automation will create a ‘new useless class’.

12. The UK population of over-85s, for example, is set to treble to 5.1 million by 2066.

Fully automated luxury lifestyles

Thanks for listening this week.

Utopia means nowhere in Greek. For that reason, some believe that when Thomas Moore wrote his 1516 work he intended a satire on humankind’s endless, doomed search for the perfect society.

In other words: new world, same (imperfect) humans. But that shouldn’t mean a terminal pessimism. In 2021, we have the chance to build a better world. It’s an opportunity we shouldn’t waste.

The NWSH community is founded on a powerful idea: that we can supercharge one another’s quest to build the future we all deserve.

Right now, there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Remember, our community becomes smarter, more creative, and more useful as it becomes larger and more diverse. To help, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, relative, or colleague – who’d also enjoy it? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let others know why you think it’s worth their time.

And remember, if you seek access to the Same Humans Utopia, you’ll find it inside our Slack group.

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 14,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This week Facebook announced that they’ll restore news content to Australian users.

The tech giant has promised to sign payment deals with media providers; in return, the Australian government has backed down on plans to force the platform to pay every time a user links to news content.

It’s an uneasy truce in a dispute that raised deep questions about the future of the internet, and the survival of independent journalism in a connected world.

So this week, reflections on all that. All centred around three questions. What happened to the dream of the open web? How do we build a better internet? And what will it take to save the news industry?

Go ahead; hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #55.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Next month it will be 31 years since Tim Berners-Lee sent a memo entitled Information Management: A Proposal to his boss at the physics research laboratory CERN.

2. Worldwide, around 90% of internet searches take place on Google properties.

3. Here in the UK, Facebook accounts for around 50% of display ad revenue.

4. A range of observers, including Berners-Lee himself, criticised the Australian legislation because it breaks a traditional principle of the open web: frictionless linking between pages.

5. Here in the UK, Facebook paid £28.5 million in corporation tax last year.

6. We’re a long way from Web3 decentralised apps, or Dapps, that replace Google, Facebook, or Uber.

7. A familiar face is working to make the new dream of a decentralised web a reality.

Get the memo

Thanks for reading this week.

I remember feeling a tectonic shift online when Web 2.0 emerged in the early 2000s. Now, I’m increasingly persuaded that we will see an even more significant change via the technologies of decentralisation. But how soon?

Of course, New World Same Humans is already built on one of the great, decentralised technologies of web 1.0: email!

This week, I’d love it if you used the power of your email network to help fuel our amazing community.

Remember, our community becomes smarter, more creative, and more useful as it becomes larger and more diverse. To help, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, relative, or colleague – who’d also enjoy it? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let others know why you think it’s worth their time.

Your membership of this community means a lot. I’ll be back on Wednesday with news and analysis in 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 14,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

A short note this week. There are two reasons; one personal and one interplanetary.

First, I took a few days off for my birthday. Even a newsletter obsessive has to live a little 🎉

Second, NASA’s Perseverance became the fifth rover to land on Mars. Looking at the first pictures it beamed back to Earth, and given the other worldly weirdness of the year we’ve just lived through, it felt a good moment to pause and reflect.

Enough preamble; just hit play!

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

David.

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 14,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

What is true? It’s a question that’s easy to ask, but seemingly ever-more difficult to answer.

A networked world has, as the 20th-century media theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted, created a Global Village: a single cultural space available to anyone with an internet connection.

But that village has enacted a paradox. In bringing us together, it’s pushed us apart. Rather than creating a single story that we can all believe in, it’s allowed a million and more narratives to bloom.

I was reminded of all this by two news items this week.

Donald Trump was acquitted in his second impeachment trial. A chapter closes, but the US remains as divided as ever. Is it possible to reunite the American people around a shared baseline understanding of their socio-political reality?

Researchers at the University of California created deepfake videos that fooled the most advanced, AI-fuelled deepfake detectors. A reminder, then, that while 21st-century media is already a hall of mirrors, it’s set to become a whole lot more confusing.

So this week, reflections on the future of truth, media, and the shared culture we inhabit. Or to put it another way: The Reality Crisis and How To Fix It.

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #53.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. A January YouGov poll of US Republicans found that 30% had a favourable view of QAnon, the conspiracy theory that the US government is secretly controlled by a deep-state network of powerful Satanists.

2. The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer – the world’s largest survey of trust in government, business, and media – found trust in all news sources, including social media, has fallen to record lows: 53% said they trusted traditional media.

3. The recent GameStop meme stocks debacle showed how we can still be caught unawares by new and unexpected viral dynamics.

4. The emergence of broadcast technologies and the totalitarian systems of the 20th-century are intertwined stories.

Ghost in the network

Thanks for reading this week.

The future of truth remains uncertain. There’s just so much we don’t yet understand about the behaviour of information and people inside a networked world.

All I can promise is that New World Same Humans will be watching the evolution of the infocommons every step of the way. And seeking to understand what it all means for our shared future.

If that mission speaks to you, there’s one thing you can do to help. Share!

Remember, our community becomes more useful to each of us as it becomes larger and more diverse. So if you know someone – a friend, relative, or colleague – who’d make a great addition, why not forward this email and encourage them to sign up? Or share New World Same Humans across your social networks with a note on what makes it valuable.

Your membership of this community means a lot; and that’s the truth. I’ll be back on Wednesday. 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 14,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This newsletter is underpinned by a model of historical change. In short: new technologies collide with universal, and fundamentally stable, human needs. The results are emergent behaviours, attitudes, and modes of life.

The human needs I’m talking about are foundational; think security, convenience, and social connection. But when it comes to our shared future inside modernity, there’s one need that it always pays to remember: status.

All this came to mind this week. News arrived that Jeff Bezos is stepping down as CEO of Amazon, in part to focus on his space startup Blue Origin. The competition between Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX is set to intensify, and it’s hard not to see, in all this, a particular kind of supercharged, Billionaire vs Billionaire status race. Bezos and Musk both want to be the 21st-century titan remembered for securing our off-Earth future. There can be only one.

All this might sound cynical. But I don’t mean to accuse Bezos or Musk of superficiality. The impulse towards status is about far more than simple showing off, or naked self-advancement – though they are real human impulses, too. Rather, it’s rooted deep in our shared nature, and is at heart about the need to be seen, to be recognised, by the collective. Hegel believed that this kind of recognition plays a vital role in the process via which each of us constitutes our sense of self; that none of us can really be a person at all without the recognition of others.

Most of us aren’t about to send a rocket into space. But we’re all, in our own ways, questing for status. What’s more, inside advanced consumerism that quest can explain much behaviour that seems strange, chaotic, or even self-defeating.

In the 2020s, emerging technologies will unlock new ways to serve this deep human need. As it always has, the status race will mutate, taking forms that are new and – from our vantage point now – strange.

If we want a glimpse of our shared future, we should seek to understand these changes. So this week, reflections on the past, present, and future of the eternal human quest for status.

Enough preamble; hit play!

If you prefer to read this instalment, go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #52.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Outside academia, US psychologist Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is still influential.

2. See the Silicon Valley billionaires who are all: I rise each morning at 5am and walk barefoot in the snow, just like the Stoics of ancient Greece.

3. Wakefulness drug Modafinil produces measurable improvements in fluid intelligence.

4. In 2018 Chinese scientist Professor He Jiankui claimed to have created the world’s first gene-edited babies; he was later jailed for this work.

5. In the 2020s, we’ll see new forms of search for the Exit, including the Silicon Valley coder who pursues FIRE and then builds her own log cabin.

6. Fashion label Marc Jacobs created virtual outfits for Animal Crossing avatars.

To infinity and beyond

Thanks for listening this week.

The 21st-century status race will continue to evolve around us in the years ahead. It’s the stuff this newsletter was made for: an age-old human story in collision with a hyper-technological world. I only wish I could travel forwards to 2121 and see how it has all played out.

In the absence of time travel, though, New World Same Humans will be watching every step of the way, for as long as humanly possible.

And right now, there’s one thing you can do to help our collective project: share!

Remember, our community becomes more useful to each of us as it becomes larger and more diverse. So if you know someone – a friend, relative, or colleague – who’d make a great addition, why not forward this email and encourage them to sign up? Or share New World Same Humans across your social networks with a note on what makes it valuable.

Remember, reading NWSH is the ultimate status play. I’ll be back on Wednesday. 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 14,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

The world is complex. What handles can we grab that might allow us to understand it better?

One answer: it pays to think about what is abundant, what is scarce, and how that’s changing. So this week, reflections on that.

Before we dive in, a hat tip to the venture capitalist Albert Wenger. Albert was a recent guest on What’s NEXT, an online show about technology and business that I co-present with Monique van Dusseldorp. The discussion we had on the show, and Albert’s book World After Capital, did much to inform this week’s instalment. Links to both at the end of this email.

In the spirit, this week, of delivering things in threes: here are three central lines from what follows.

First, we’re moving from the industrial age to the knowledge age. Second, what we need above all else is a new system for deciding where humanity directs its attention. And third, in an imaginary world of universal abundance, all that remains is the quest to really see one another.

Now hit play!

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #51.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Last year, China built a new hospital in Wuhan in days.

2. AI solved one of biology’s most famous challenges: the protein folding problem.

3. The full episode of What’s NEXT with Albert Wenger.

4. Albert Wenger’s book World After Capital.

You get a car

Thanks for reading this week.

You can go here to see the full episode of What’s NEXT, featuring the interview with Albert Wenger. And I highly recommend you check out Albert’s brilliant World After Capital, which you can read for free online.

New World Same Humans can’t promise to solve the problems presented by our emergence into the knowledge age. But it will keep watching, and trying to make sense of, this moment and what it means for our shared future.

We started out as a small tribe back in January 2020. Now, there are over 14,000 of us – founders, designers, marketers, policy makers, and more – on a shared journey to imagine, and help build, a better future. If you know someone – a friend, relative, or colleague – who’d make a great addition, why not forward this email and encourage them to sign up? Alternatively, share New World Same Humans across your social networks with a note on what makes it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse our community becomes, the better for all of us.

However abundant we become, your membership of this community means a lot.

I’ll be back on Wednesday. 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