[p2p-research] rifkin on empathic politics

[Michel Bauwens]

Joseph Jackson <joseph.jackson at gmail.com> Jan 11 03:48PM -0800 ^


Even if Rifkin has been a critic of nanotech and sometimes fear monger
(gray goo, etc), it is good to see a mainstream press article
explicitly calling for P2P.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-rifkin/the-empathic-civilization_b_416589.html

"In the 21st century, hundreds of millions--and eventually billions--
of human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to
harvest renewable energies on site, store those energies in the form
of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local,
regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the
Internet. The open source sharing of energy, like open source sharing
of information, will give rise to collaborative energy spaces--not
unlike the collaborative social spaces that currently exist on the
Internet."



"The nation-state, which grew up alongside the First and Second
Industrial Revolutions, and provided the regulatory mechanism for
managing an energy regime whose reach was the geosphere, is ill suited
for a Third Industrial Revolution whose domain is the biosphere.
Distributed renewable energies generated locally and regionally and
shared openly--peer to peer--across vast contiguous land masses
connected by intelligent utility networks and smart logistics and
supply chains favor a seamless network of governing institutions that
span entire continents."

"The new biosphere politics transcends traditional right/left
distinctions so characteristic of the geopolitics of the modern market
economy and nation-state era. The new divide is generational and
contrasts the traditional top-down model of structuring family life,
education, commerce, and governance with a younger generation whose
thinking is more relational and distributed, whose nature is more
collaborative and cosmopolitan, and whose work and social spaces favor
open-source commons. For the Internet generation, "quality of life"
becomes as important as individual opportunity in fashioning a new
dream for the 21st century.

The transition to biosphere consciousness has already begun. All over
the world, a younger generation is beginning to realize that one's
daily consumption of energy and other resources ultimately affects the
lives of every other human being and every other creature that
inhabits the Earth.

The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast
extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and
national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast
project of life that envelops the Earth. But our rush to universal
empathic connectivity is running up against a rapidly accelerating
entropic juggernaut in the form of climate change. Can we reach
biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary
collapse?"

-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

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