These days it is not unusual for the elderly to retire from a lifetime in one occupation and embark upon entirely new ventures. What is rare, and possibly unique, is for that venture to be so challenging that it will require a momentous leap in consciousness for it to have any chance of success.
The original impulse behind the Centre for the Future was to face up to the most critical challenge facing humanity: whether we are wise enough as a species to survive our own success.
Established as an endowment for future generations, with a one-hundred-year mission to design and curate a world that works for everyone - a world where the truest expressions of what it means to be human can be realised - the Centre for the Future was constituted as part knowledge amplifier, part whole-system incubator, and part pluriversal think-tank.
Making the world work for everyone is an insanely ambitious mission of course. It requires designing at scale, through the lens of the human family, and with adequate provisioning. In terms of the latter we were fortunate to have a founding donor whose commitment to seed-fund the Centre was embraced by Steve Graham as a unique gift for his children and grandchildren. His generosity in that regard was matched only by my own determination to inspire a vision that would remain relevant and viable long after my passing.
The unlikely combination of a left-leaning public intellectual, resident in Thailand, with an affluent, died-in-the-wool, Australian businessman, was an odd union to say the least and almost from the start differences of opinion could have resulted in a premature parting of the ways. Instead this odd couple cultivated a singularly different kind of business, united by their concern for the wellbeing of future generations.
Three years into our journey and the Centre is evolving a new praxis concerning second order change. Those in the know, all around the world, are fascinated by the proposition. In our initial exploratory projects, we have rebooted democracy, developed the world’s first blockchain enabled community decision-making platform, and are now proposing a suite of experiments for waging peace, starting in the Middle East.
Our aim of beneficially impacting the lives of over a billion people by consciously evolving and refashioning our most life-critical systems, is audacious. Thinking on that scale is not a trivial matter. Great care must be taken to find systemic acupuncture points that get local results with the least amount of effort and excessive disturbance to people’s lives.
Having identified five theatres of human activity, where complexity demands intelligence-driven visualisation, and transformation via cultural and cognitive development, in parallel with the advancement of new experiential states, we chose to start with the issue of power and governance, how it is used, and the consequences of its abuse.
Recognising the various ways in which power is exercised in modern societies, particularly as an instrument of the state, we set out to test the legitimacy of democracy, as well as the ethos of representation, in different geographical regions today. By using digital tools, we were able to design and incubate a community engagement and decision-making model that re-engaged citizens in the political process, while eliminating the flaws present in the Westminster model – defects such as party-defined dogma, career politicians, the lack of transparency, undue influence by special interests, corporate donations, unsophisticated policy framing, media bias, and inadequate public consultation.
The result was MiVote, a model, platform, social movement and smartphone app. MiVote was launched by the Centre with an explicit purpose in mind: to work out if democracy, even in its most unadulterated form, is viable in circumstances that differ so dramatically from those which existed when the idea was first deployed.
MiVote quickly gathered momentum, becoming a socio-political movement in a number of countries, including India, the world’s most populous nation and continues to receive accolades and plaudits from all sides of the political spectrum. In turn, it became the test-case for whether the Centre for the Future could capture the attention of philanthropists in contributing to second order paradigmatic change.
The answer to that question emerged slowly and it was disheartening. We learnt that the impulse to give is still dominated by the attraction of first order change. Indeed, that any nascent altruism or democratic cause is chronically unattractive to conventional donors. Needing to feel good and look good still drives most philanthropy today.
Deeper still was our realisation that even the most celebrated, wealthy, advocates for a new social order are actually involved in a charade where their own interests are upheld, and that their much-publicised efforts to “change the world” merely sustain the status quo while obscuring their role in causing the problems they then espouse to solve. At least this rammed home the nature of the gargantuan challenge ahead of us.
On the other hand, we also discovered that the decision-making platform we had created had broader social implications and that the blockchain technology on which it was built provided immutability right at the time of the US election controversy in late 2016 and early 2017. As you can imagine this was comforting. All was not lost if we could find a way of leveraging our own technology as a sustainable income source for the Centre.
During the second quarter of 2017 we noticed the emerging crypto-currency market fire up with the adoption of Ethereum as a technology platform and digital currency for smart-contracts. In July 2017 the Centre decided to spin Horizon State out of MiVote, ceding the technology rights to the new company while leaving the business model for democratic community engagement with MiVote. A relationship agreement was put in place between the two entities, providing MiVote with the right to use the Horizon State technology. This reciprocal gesture gave Horizon State its first major customer as well as a global brand and presence. It also provided the Centre with a unique template for a self-funded future.
In November 2017 Horizon State ran Australia’s second ever crypto-currency Initial Coin Offering (ICO) which raised $1.4m and capitalised Horizon State at around $40m once the Horizon State Token was listed on a number of global exchanges early the following year. This provided the necessary provisions to staff and resource both MiVote and Horizon State whilst returning the initial seed funding to the Centre.
Having reflected on our journey this far we know that the motivations for traditional philanthropy are utterly incompatible with the complexity embedded in second order change. Consequently, in order to keep the Centre viable, we need to ideate, incubate and earn from initiatives that deliver first order proceeds in pursuit of second order outcomes.
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