Automation plus the current version of corporate capitalism is creating the perfect storm for those of us commonly known as labour. Most companies and labour laws are structured around an industrial model of capital and labour. The innovation that will save human work will be new business and operating models. Common wisdom is that we need to divide the owners of financial capital from the creators of knowledge capital. Such artificial hierarchies are not needed, though many say that hierarchies exist in nature and therefore are a part of the human condition as well. At least one piece of recent research shows that this is wrong. Early herders produced significant communal works without hierarchies.

“Work by a team of US-based experts on a remote site near Lake Turkana in Kenya contradicts longstanding beliefs about the origins of the first civilisations. It suggests that early communities did not inevitably develop powerful elites or compete violently for scarce resources, but may have worked together to overcome challenges instead.”

“Researchers studying the early history of agricultural societies believe large groups of people built permanent monuments to reinforce identities based on a sense of shared history, ideals and culture.”

“When agrarian societies started to develop, hierarchies started to develop too. Some people became more powerful and disparities in wealth and health and social circumstances emerged. So the big question is: Did the same thing happen in pastoral societies?” said Hildebrand.

“Lothagam North pillar site is the earliest known monumental site in eastern Africa … built by the region’s first herders … and gives us solid evidence that these pastoralists did indeed follow a different trajectory of social change. People came together in large numbers, probably expending blood, sweat and tears to build these large structures, but we have no evidence for hierarchy or social difference.” —The Guardian 2018-08-20

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Models can give us a place to start to have a conversation in order to develop shared understanding. Mental models are one of the five disciplines of a learning organization, according to Peter Senge. I have frequently used the model of the Laws of Media developed by Marshall and Eric McLuhan which state that every medium (technology) used by people has four effects. Every medium extends a human property, obsolesces the previous medium (& often makes it a luxury good), retrieves a much older medium, and reverses its properties when pushed to its limits. These four aspects are known as the media tetrad.

As our society becomes immersed in the technology of social media, whether they be Facebook, Twitter or something else, we read much criticism as well as hype. But with the tetrad, we can have a conversation around the four effects without the hype or fear. For example, there is little doubt that social media extend our voice, as mine has been extended with this blog. They enable what Seb Paquet calls “ridiculously easy group-forming”, so that we can find similar voices in the wilderness. I remember what it was like waiting for new books to come to the school library in the 1970’s. They were my connection to the outside world. Now we have this connectivity, to information and people, in our hands.

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