Indy Johar: A World in Flux

In this episode of SystemShift, Indy Johar, an architect who specialises in re-imagining institutions and envisioning different economies and relationships, argues that we are vastly underestimating the scale of the challenges we face. According to Indy, the next few decades will completely redesign everything around us, including our material world such as our clothes, food, and furniture, as well as some of our concepts, including those of value, pricing, ownership, and work. He sees us on the threshold of a structural transition that will fundamentally change society and our relationship with energy. Indy believes that civilisation is coming to the end of a 400-year-old vision of our world based on Cartesian dualism, where object and subject have been separated, and we are beginning to witness a re-entangling of the world around us in terms of interdependencies and externalities. Indy predicts that this transition will lead to a reassessment of philosophical, material, social, risk, and costs, bringing about a new vision of the world that is more interconnected and holistic.  

Carl Schlyter: 
Welcome to SystemShift, a Greenpeace podcast exploring new ideas and thinking for those who want to create a kinder economic system. Today we are joined by Indy Johar, an architect and a co-founder of Dark Matter Laboratories, an organization dedicated to developing new support frameworks for collaborative system change.

Indy is a visionary and thought leader in the field of architecture and design with a passion for creating systems that work for people and the planet. He believes that the current economic system is driving the destruction of our planet and that we need a radical shift in the way we think about, design and implement our systems. If we want to prevent this from happening.

Through his work at Dark Matter Laboratories, he is pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the field of economic system change. He is leading a campaign to create more equitable, sustainable and regenerative economic system that puts people and the planet first. Dark Matter Laboratories is a field laboratory focused on radically redesigning the bureaucratic institutional infrastructure in our cities, regions and towns for a more democratic distributed great transition. It is doing some of the most interesting work on rethinking economic relationships, value and monetary flows. Indy’s work is a beacon of hope for those who believe that a better future is possible, that we can work together to create a world where economic systems serve people and the planet, not just interest of a few.

In this podcast, we’ll be exploring Indy’s work and the innovative approaches he’s taking to create system change. We will delve into the challenges he faces and the impact his work is having and exciting new projects in the pipeline. So without further ado, a warm welcome to you Indy.

Indy Johar:
Delighted to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

The transaction-based economy

Carl Schlyter: 
And thank you for coming.  I think when I have been listening to what you have been saying at different conferences and so on, it is really this kind of transaction-based economy rather than having relations that is a key problem. When we allocate things, incorrectly and where we do not see the consequences of things we do and things we do have negative aspects. Is this something you would like to explain a little bit the difference between relational and transactional?

Indy Johar:
Yeah. I think over the last sort of 400 years, we’ve built a worldview and that worldview has been constructed around the idea of seeing separation between ourselves and the world around us, and between each other. That object-subject world view, which actually has heralded the last 400 years of science in many ways, was built through this theory of separation and whether it’s classification theory, whether it’s Cartesian logic, whether object subject. I would argue even the birth of perspective was a theory of power and separation. Power and separation has allowed for transactions between separate things. However, it has also allowed for violence between those separate things. I think what’s really the paradigmatic moment that we’re living in is that it’s separation, which perhaps was useful, perhaps created the landscape for this transition we’re in the middle of has also allowed for invisible violence, and it’s also allowed for externality. Those externalities and those feedbacks are now self-terminating us and CO2 is just one, whether it’s the largest by extinction or largest by extinctions for the planet at sea. There is also another aspect of this. I think where in this worldview shift from kind of how we have separated ourselves and each other, and understood the world through its separation to a reemergence of the entanglement. What we are seeing is the feedback cycles of our big two externalities are challenging our theory of how we relate, how we understand ourselves in the world, and how we relate to the world. Then the way property, the ideal property to own things is a foundational worldview where you say humans have dominion over the world and we can optimize it to our needs. Without understanding the interdependencies of a piece of land with water systems, with logical systems, with microbiomes, all sorts of things which can be discounted for the utility of us – and that utility of us is now self-terminating us because all these invisible things are actually massively calming us. I think you are right to say there is a foundational transition going on in terms of how we relate to ourselves, how we understand ourselves as humans, but also how we relate to the world and how we understand the world through its entangled.

The present and future worldviews

Carl Schlyter: 
There are so many interesting aspects here in what you brought up, I mean, we have the separation from us and nature and this kind of dominance and control logic towards nature. We have this transactional view into human relations, which means that we have discrimination, control and violence, as you mentioned. This permits rather, the view of nature of being exploited. Shall we go through a little bit about this because, I don’t know if you’ve read the book from Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature. I think that was really interesting because she showed how during this thousands of years we have been civilization growing and so on, how the view of nature changed from like life living mother Earth to an evil stepmother holding its precious metals deep underground, and how this transformation of philosophy towards nature change us. So that the first aspect of this and you mentioned the last 400 years, of course, this has escalated what permitted us to do this change. Why did this change happen you think?

Indy Johar:
I think there were loads of things, one is kind of I think culturally we went through an age of understanding the world, that we were dominating the world, we were in control of the world. I am not even yet certain that this is good or bad. What I am more interested in is that these are moments of civilizational development, and I think we are reaching the end of a civilization of development theory. I think we are reaching a moment where the theory of control, the theory of dominion, actually is self-harming us. Now we need to move to recognizing that perhaps we’re living in a new planetary singularity where human machine ecological systems are becoming, the planet itself is becoming conscious, so the new paradigm is approaching where we can start to see our entanglements not as a loss, but which is a new, profound capacity which has never existed before. Obviously, every age has had its associated disasters and associated sort of externality and massive, even huge violence. I also think we are reaching the end of that age and having to embrace a new way of being and that if we don’t, I don’t think we survive. You know, I think the fact is our current worldview is massively driving huge amounts of externalities, and those externalities will self-terminate those either directly or indirectly. Radical kind of scarcities that we are about to see, whether it’s in copper or timber or sand, the fundamentals. Forget the rare earths. The fundamentals will actually drive us to some form of geopolitical tensions, and even more. I think there’s a really profound moment that we have to move through, which is actually to do with scarcity, with a new type of institutional logic. To deal with that scarcity as we reach a new theory of abundance of the next 40 years, where maybe energy and materials do become superabundant again. To do that, we have to actually change our world view and go through a kind of transition, a kind of a transformation moment. To change our worldview and our relationship to it. I think that’s now also possible at the intersection of our computational capabilities are giving us the capacity to make this new bureaucratic world view. Our worldview was constructed through the efficacy of bureaucracy in accounting. Now with computational capabilities, we construct a new landscape of that reality. We can talk about, you know, how do you make a river Self-sovereign and put a point of view which is not a human extractive point of view, but actually points of view, which looks a river and its relationship to it, the value it generates and spills over and really radical ways. We can genuinely create a multi agent point of worldview. We could actually potentially help support that multi-agent point of view so we can move from a theory of assets to a theory of agencies. I think that’s an extraordinary moment and it’s gifted by us, by some of the competition capacities that we are starting to unlock and have access to. But, that’s going to require a concerted effort and a deep transformation of our world view so that we have relationships, we are relationships, and this is a fundamental transformation of who we are and thereby our relationship with the world. That cascades into our institutional framework that cascades into our worldview of how we construct it, and thereby also what we value and how we value it.

Consumption as a dopamine response to the tyranny of work

Carl Schlyter: 
I think it is interesting you mentioned these examples with the rivers, like, for example, New Zealand or Costa Rica, where we have seen the start of nature’s right logic into changing our view on nature. What gives me hope is, as you mentioned in history, we had different problems. When you talk about scarcity in abundance, I mean when these theories developed, the scarcity was our capacity to transform nature to things that made our lives easier. Now we are facing a new system limit. It’s not our capacity that is limited anymore. It’s nature’s capacity to deal with all what we want to do with it. So earlier, we changed our worldview when we needed it for development and now we should change the worldview again, seeing our interdependency and how nature put limits on what we can do. Then the view of nature should change. We realized into dependency that I should interpret this.

Indy Johar:
Yeah, and I think these things are coming at us and I think they will transform not only nature based things like rivers and other things, but also our world view of things. What happens if a house owns itself, right? A theory of dominion isn’t just about nature. It’s also about the things around us, what happens to our relationship with things which recognizes that a book is a knot of matter and information that exists for a moment and then bifurcates into other flows. So even a book is a flow of things. It’s a sort of relationship, not a thing itself. So I think this worldview will manifest from the kind of rights of nature into our everyday world, everything around us. That means we have a very different relationship here with how we manifest. I think this is a beginning of a story, but it’s often discounted because we often talk about the climate transition in terms of decarbonization. Actually, carbon is barely a symptom of the problem. It’s a symptom, not the problem. The fundamental problem is actually we’re creating a world you, whether it’s carbon or heavy metals. We’re releasing vast amounts of pollutants in the system, unless we change our worldview, how we relate to things, I think we don’t deal with it. And final point, I’d say is also on nature with things has been driven through a theory of consumption, and largely that consumption theory has been based on, I would say, since Henry T Ford, has been based on almost dealing with the externalities of work itself. Work is a mechanism of doing repeated work, and then consumption is a point of almost deal with the tyrannies of work itself in different formats. Consumption has been like a dopamine response to the tyranny of work where we suppressed ourselves and enslaved ourselves to simple actions to allow us to heal from that, we use consumption as a dopamine. It’s largely not for the thing itself, but it’s the act of validation, the act of social validation. I think unless we start to change our relationship with consumption, our relationship with work, we do not deeply go into solving what I think is the root causes of sort of some of this stuff that we are overconsuming and mis-consuming. We are not consuming for value. We are consuming for the dopamine hits and I think that’s a key part of that story because we’re going to have to reduce our nature of consumption or shift our consumption for materiality and relationship to things to immaterial landscapes. So I think this is a deep code transformation both of the nature of things, but also on nature of what we want things for and their dire relationship with things in a really fundamental way. 

The 21^st Century work economy

Carl Schlyter: 
I think it’s also nice that you mentioned this. We have an episode in this series with Pickett and Wilkinson exactly about this, the comparative consumption rather than consumption for actually solving problems or dealing with things that could make our lives better. People who want to listen to the negative impacts of increasing inequality can listen to the episode with Pickett and Wilkinson. When you talk about this consumerism and work as a problem, that’s kind of interesting because every politician, I used to be one myself, has always said we must create work. But inherently most of our innovation has been targeting to work less hard so how come this has been the dominant narrative of the political class to always promise more work, more jobs?

Indy Johar:
So I think the problem is not more or less, but the nature of work itself. I mean, our theory of work has been built around a theory of command and control. Management is a theory of control orientated from the idea of military service, of theory of production and mass manufacturing was born out of kind of military theories. I think what’s really fundamental, I’m questioning, that place the human as a bad robot. Most employment laws are largely an extension of slavery, frankly. So I don’t think we rebuild a work economy for the 21st century. A 21st century work economy is not about extrinsic motivation. It is not about extrinsic command and control. It is about building the capacity for intrinsic self-authoring capacity of humans and ennobling humans to do the work that’s required, rather than controlling humans to do what’s required.

Carl Schlyter: 
That’s ironic, actually, because when we talk about work, we always talked about paid laborers. We are not mentioning the things people do because they want to do it for its intrinsic value. One experiment in Trondheim in Norway where they did this was they came with the idea that we need to have a more efficient public service there. It was too expensive. They couldn’t afford to have the service that citizens needed without raising the taxes. So they made a deal with the labor unions that instead of having democracy perfectly and then 9:00 in the morning, you stop democracy and you have hierarchy, and then 5:00 again you start democracy. They thought; why not introduce democracy at work? Why not have a corporation mentality rather than a dominance and control mentality at work? This led to so many efficiency gains, reduced sick leave, and psychological ill health. The whole reform was paid for by the better well-being of workers when they felt in control. When this dominance-control-slavery logic that you mentioned was not there anymore. 

Indy Johar:
This is the revolution of work as necessary for, I think, 21st century. I think humans are going to have to be developing in a radical way to unlock the capacity. Capacity for embodied intelligence, capacity for complex cognition. That’s going to require an intrinsic motivation and I think that’s going to require new forms of foundation capabilities that require a new theory of work in the 21st century. I think the problem is most politicians are still caught up in a 19^th century theory of work, not recognizing we’ve moved on to a new theory of value. This theory of value will actually shift our theory of consumption because we no longer seeking dopamine hits in a false format to deal with the tyranny of work in itself. This is a deep part of the change theory that’s critical. It also starts to thereby change our theory about the nature of things, the nature of how we relate to the world, because it’s fundamental for that transition.

Transition from a consumptive economy

Carl Schlyter: 
And that fits rather well into happiness research that people who feel control and empowered at workspace, they tend to feel much better and be much better be happier people. So changing this, what work is and how it should be designed would actually make us happier. But how do we get from the current narrative where everything is related to consumption power, into what kind of transformative step would you see would help us to go from the current logic to the future one?

Indy Johar:
So I think there’s multiple aspects to this. I think firstly, I think it’s very clear that our current economy is based towards. If you have a can of coke and an orange or a sustainable apple, let’s say a current economy is geared towards a can of coke because the can of coke is cheaper, it’s addictive it externalize all its costs, whereas a sustainable apple internalize this cost is more expensive and effect is non-addictive. Therefore, what you have is a current optimization of our economy to allocate capital to the production consumption of Coke. I use that as a metaphor that our current economy is geared to its production of cans of Coke. If we want to shift it to look at not just the unit cost of a can of coke, but the system cost of a can of coke, which is, you know, the sugar impacts diabetes, sort of CO2 releases, our transportation costs. XYZ

Carl Schlyter: 
An exploitation of underpaid people in the global South?

Indy Johar:
Absolutely. Then you compare that to an apple, what we know, the apple is much cheaper for society as a whole. So the question that really comes to the table is the first thing we have to do is we have to re-gear our economy to understand the system level cost not just the unit level costs and I think that’s really critical part of the story. Second, I think we have to change the nature of work itself and actually create the kind of the Nordic revolution could be argued based on, you know, the box schools, the people schools, which are all about building self- authoring capacity. They were about skills; they were about skills and philosophy coming together to actually build a self- authoring capacity of citizens. I think we have to rebuild the self- authoring capacity rather than the instrumentalization of citizens. Therefore, we have to rebuild the self- authoring capacity of citizens in a new format. I think that we have to recognize that our economy is going to face fundamental shifts in terms of materiality. For example, we don’t have the materials to build new homes in Northern Europe. We don’t have the carbon budgets to build the new homes, we don’t have the carbon budget. What the spatial justice mean, where we don’t have the capacity to build new homes because we don’t have the carbon budgets, we don’t have the materiality in our cities, we can’t afford to release more CO2 each year. What the how do we share the materiality? How do we stop the material hoarding actually reducing the capacity of society? So what does that innovation look like? How do we rebuild that rejuvenate our ecological system, both in economics that understands the agency of things around us and the world around us. This to me is a deep code transition. It’s also our nature of things moving away from theories of ownership, but not from ownership to rentals, but looking at self-sovereignty of things, of relationship, intrinsic, a new idea of agency. A world of agency rather than assets. Which means of recognizing everything as an agent of the pass through of kind of materiality and flows to it. That means that we operate in a relationship with care with things not in the relationship of consumption and destruction. This is a structural that might, I would say this in a structural transition as big as the Industrial Revolution, and yet we’re trying to see it as a tinkering edge of the Industrial Revolution. This is a transformative revolution. Everything around us of food systems will change, our energy systems will trade, and material systems will change. Every one of these things will evolve. I think what we have not really done is start to understand about scale of transition. We need to construct a new politics around this and the discourse around this. This is about deeply a new and nobeling reality of humanity. We have to move forward beyond the theory of control to a theory, but nobly we have to embrace the management, as a theory of orchestration is no longer fit for purpose in a complex, emergent world. That requires learning to be at the center of orchestration rather than control, and that requires CEOs not to be the chief executive officers, but the chief learning officers. We have to build new theories of risk. That means that risk is held by those the closest capacity to innovate. Rather than at the center point of this organization. This is a foundational transition.

Carl Schlyter: 
This is actually not new. I studied at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and when those buildings were built, Sweden’s most famous sculptor was assigned to decorate them, and they did art history and philosophy in the beginning, not to become engineers, disconnected from other values. That thinking was there already. All those educations are now kicked out a new houses are built without this kind of thought in it. This fits very well into the neoliberal production logic we see dominant now. I think this narrative of bringing back this logic that people cannot be, you know, only expert in one single field disconnected from everything else, that’s not going to work. Well, it’s just going to say on this this point that you’re making,

Indy Johar:
I think we have to talk about polymathic capabilities. So while society has created silos. Of learning, but actually all innovations are virtually always at the intersection of disciplines. So how do you build societies, which encourage polymathic capabilities and the intersection of capabilities across disciplines? That has to be an intentional act. As opposed to being dividing us into ever and smaller and smaller disciplines with no capacity to interrelate or build the complex realities of the whole.

Freedom, not as a theory of escape

Carl Schlyter: 
Yeah, and it’s also much more interesting to see the context of what you’re interested in in other contexts is because then you will learn more, you will see more applications for what you are thinking about. I think it also will help us create more freedom of thought and development. Another thing when I listen to you now was the concept of what freedom is. I think that has been distorted. Do you agree?

Indy Johar:
Absolutely, because freedom, as we’ve seen it at freedom, has become a method of escape. We’ve created a system with a system of control. Then what we do is we say freedom is your theory of escape from that system of controls. If you accumulate enough wealth, you are free to escape that system. We’ve kind of created freedom as a theory of that something, a carrot we dangle in a system which is entirely about the tyranny of control and that’s been the incentive system. We’ve created languages around freedom. We have massively we need to think about freedom as an inherent quality of the system, not the quality that is outside the system. So what would happen if you would talk about freedom? Not a sort of theory of escape; but the freedom to care, the freedom to be present, the freedom to engage, the freedom to be deeply human. I think those are the deep freedoms that we need to expand. I think in a complex, entangled world, actually, it is a freedom to care that allows us to have a relationship with each other and that requires us to be embodied humans with new capacities. I think we have to intentionally re-grasp words like freedom and give them new purpose, because I think that becomes systematically problematic right now. We need to re-grasp them and re-embody them in a world of entanglement. What freedom really mean. Freedom needs to be embodied; to be in relationship and to be in true relationship and operate in our theory of care and freedom in that reality is a mutual freedom. Freedom of mutualities as opposed to discrete freedoms of escape.

Care as the mentality of operation

Carl Schlyter: 
That’s really interesting narrative now, because, I mean, in many ways, the modern, individualistic, capitalist, consumerist society, when you mention care, people think about burdens and duties rather than as a liberating fact for realizing true freedom. I think that’s interesting. How would you then help people following the logic of the research, the proven the proven theory of that care, relationships, interdependency actually liberate as more gives us more happiness, gives us better life quality. How would you argue to do this mental internal change so we can reset the goals to something that actually benefits us and the planet, rather than destroying both of us?

Indy Johar:
I do not think this is some moral moment. I mean, I think this is the moment of how we discover value and this is the other thing that we often argue this from a moral case. I would say that in an age of complexity and emergence, care is the mentality of operation, which is critical. Innovation is going to be discovered through its intentional capacities to care. We’re going to democratize the capacity to innovate advance skills. For me, this is not a moral case. It is the new economic case and it is a new economic case of operating in a machine enabled society and an entangled ecological society, which we have to create a new operating procedure and protocols for dealing with complex entanglements. I think so I am less and less kind of convinced that we should be making a moral case, but actually a new  logical case to say this is how we need to operate and this is how value will be discovered in the 21st century and almost certainly our theories of control no longer can control. Our theories of command and control can no longer manage the externalities, which are self-terminating us. Theories of command and control no longer actually can do with the risks that be created in businesses. So it’s very clear that our theory of control no longer becomes efficacy or possible in a tangled complex emergent landscape of that. I think it means that we’re at the end of a cycle of a way of organizing to a new way of organizing. This new way of organizing as a new economy, to a new theory of value to it, and a new behavior like, you know, the industrial age we were taught to go to schools to allow us to be programed, to become predictable, to go to 9 to 5, 9 to 3 o’clock schools. That was all about giving us predictability, building new capabilities that I think of to build new capabilities for a new society and a new economy that recognizes that we moved beyond theories of control. 

Carl Schlyter: 
So, I mean, both of us actually argue for there is scientific evidence, there is logic that would promote this change. But, when we speak about this new way of having an economy built, what kind of structures would need to change? What decisions, what laws would need to change, not only the mindset, what changes could we do to laws and practices that would help people with this mind shift?

Indy Johar:
Yeah, I think we’re starting to see some of them already. I think changing our relationship with nature, the right to nature stuff is a good beginning. I think we have to invest in human development and I think the inner development goals, the work that’s going on there with people like Tomas Björkman, and other people, I think that’s a key part of the story. We have to build a new 21st century, self-authoring capacity of citizens. So investing in human development becomes critical because I think in unlocks us from the tyranny of mal-consumption in different formats, which is actually critical. You know, Sweden, the average Swede, consumes 27 tons of matter a year. The global average is two tonnes. So we have to massively reduce our material impact. I think we’re going to have to change our food systems. We have to drive actually a new food economy, which is going to look the soil not as that infinite exhaustible asset, but actually see it as an ecological infrastructure, which has to be renewed and has to be sustained in different ways. So putting the soil at the base through the food systems becomes critical and reinventing our accounting frameworks for that. Off the back of that, actually, we have to reimagine the kind of contribution of food that we have to transform our theories of understanding our built environments through theories of what our built environment is a kind of a massive landscape. Violence in many ways, whether it’s indoor air quality, it’s five times worse of outdoor air quality or whether it’s actually noise pollution, impacts of nutrition. Certainly, in big cities, actually house, if you live on a busy road, end up in a busy city, actually can lose 2 to 3 years of your life just with actually stress levels of the noise during night actually means that you end up with high levels of cortisone, which makes you more susceptible to diabetes and chronic issues. So we have to re-imagine, understand our theory of violence, and reimagine and re-scope our theories of violence and understand the impact that has on the human development. I think then we have to also start to radically talk about building an intangible economy, an intangible sort of economy. What’s that look like for the 21st century, whether it’s virtual, but it’s also about new forms of human capabilities. I think this is a fundamental transition that starts with multiple of these dimensions. I think we have to start to have; one of the final things I’d say is on this is that what I find fascinating is that the people get this. When you talk about this conversation on the ground with people, people intrinsically know the problem when you talk about the can of coke and sustainability they understand this problem and we have to talk about actually how we build a new politics and a political conversation around this. This isn’t about left to right by worldview. This is about actually understanding a new reality that’s emerging in how we operationalize ourselves to our new reality, we have to re-empower ourselves to actually think big. I think we’ve become more at the edge of market tinkerers thinking there is no other thing we could do. So how do we build the capacity to think big and act big in a civilization, recognizing where in a market, where the moment which is about almost as big as the Enlightenment, where enlightened it and the entanglement comes together to create a new worldview, we have to give ourselves the freedom to re-imagine that. 

Policy change

Carl Schlyter: 
And maybe to help people start thinking big. Sometimes it’s good to start thinking from the local perspective and draw conclusions when you talk about the soil. Let’s go back to the food, because maybe that could be an easy way to exemplify what you mean. There is this old 14th century law in one county in Sweden where the value of the inheritance was decided upon by the thickness of the fertile soil. So if you actually increase the thickness of the fertile soil, then you have been successful. If you decrease it, you have been unsuccessful. So like this is not often shown when you talk about the value of farm today or for food like a tomato that is full of pesticides and full of carbon emissions and full of human suffering on the global market, you wouldn’t see the difference between that tomato and one that has the opposite. So how would you help people in their daily lives now go for the right tomato, so to speak, go for the right soil-treatment methods? What steps can you equip the person with to see what you say, but how do you help them acting on it?

Indy Johar:
But I think this is where you inherit this conversation is right. I would actually say this is a policy problem, not a consumer problem. I think we should be measuring the thickness of the soil at the point of actually every sale and saying has increased the thickness or is it decreased? If it decreased, it will tax the sale very heavily. If it’s not real tax, it actually then put it in the sinking pot. You have to support the rejuvenation of the soil. This doesn’t have to be centralized taxation. You can book it. But sinking funds in on land, which means that if the soil becomes degraded, the sinking funds demand at the point of trade actually take a great auction, which means that the soil could be rejuvenated. So I think we have to build new fiscal mechanisms and accounting mechanisms to achieve value. The right things. Currently, we’re not seeing soil as a life form of which we live, but we’re seeing it as an infinite resource, like a machine that will run perpetuity. And we are consuming it we’re destroying it we’re undermining it. We’re destroying the nutrition quality of the food we’re getting. So I don’t think this is a consumer problem, I think it’s a of freedom to actually create reimagine that inheritance law for the 21st century. That’s the innovation.

Mind shift from consumerism

Carl Schlyter: 
Yeah. So even if it’s not a consumer problem here to the solution, one of the solutions she came up with now was, for example, taxing. I agree on that having more logical, social and ecological taxes and climate taxes and so on would help us to steer the economy in the right direction. You talked about before was also this monetization of everything, we need also the system shift in the mind of that. Not everything can be valued, even if you try to integrate all the complexities, it’s still going to be difficult to do that either centrally or locally with taxes and economic regulation. So here my question is again, the little bits, how do we help people having this mind shift of not everything is transactional, tradeable and an economic measurable way.

Indy Johar:
So from my perspective, I think this is a conversation where in the middle of a form of Cultural Revolution. A revolution of how we imagine ourselves, like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man was the birthplace of the Cultural Revolution, because it understood isolated man from nature made it platonic and it understood it in a dissected, separated way. I think there’s a kind of interesting moment where we have to have that Cultural revolution happening, as well as the accounting revolution where and these things are symbiotic. It’s not one or the other, but I think it’s the and. Yes, we have to work on reimagining our ourselves and our relationship with the world. Then we have to reimagine our relationship with governments, with things in terms of of stewardship, responsibilities, of rights and responsibility with things. It’s sort of asymmetric world. Then we also have to be able to build the fiscal and the kind of accounting norms to be able to reinforce those realities. I think we have to see it from those dimensions working together.

Shift to nature-based systems

Carl Schlyter: 
And we, as you mentioned already, we have different tools to do this. We have well, you can act as a consumer, you can act as a community, you can act as a municipality, you can act as a nation state. You can act at the European level, at the global level, within or outside of the business world. Everybody has an agency here where they can start acting. If you would recommend to European politicians a route and a venue, the lawmaking that, they could do to help this transition, what recommendations would you give them.

Indy Johar:
At this moment in time, I would start with the nature based systems. I think looking at actually how we govern the rivers across Europe and the water supply of Europe will be a critical thing. I think we are going to see big strategic issues with water systems. We are both with the summer coming, but also with actually glaciers becoming very fragile, the Alps, and other frameworks. I think the water systems story is a critical one. I do think politicians having more honest conversations about the materiality is what makes it not to be defeatist. Like, I do not think we can afford to build that across, but if we’re taking our national carbon budget seriously, but then it opens up a real important conversation, which is to say, how do we then provide spatial justice or justice of space across Europe in the 21st century when we don’t have that. I would have started encouraging politicians to link up to the science of what the is science is like to say to us and the severity of it and start to have a new political discourse. I think we need to start to have new forms of public conversations to build on.

Carl Schlyter: 
I think it’s interesting that you mentioned water. I was in the European Parliament when this water framework directive was negotiated just about 15 years ago, and the estimation we did then was that restoring water quality to the standards we set would cost around €2,000 billion. Across Europe, including the UK at the time. So yet again, in the beginning of our discussion, we talked about what gets monetary value, what gets excluded here is again showing that we had a false economic efficiency, all this water expectation.

Indy Johar:
Very much so and the implications that in terms of our health, but also in terms of our fragility is going to be significant. I totally agree with you. I think this is these are false economies that don’t understand the long term that we’re holding in a substantive way.

Vision of the future

Carl Schlyter: 
Let’s be visionary for a moment there. Let us say we are successful with this. Let us say we changed the view on nature, our relationship with nature, our relationship with each other. We get rid of the old colonialist dominance logic. We have this as the outset. How would the daily life look like? How would our relations look like if this were the basis for our interactions in economy?

Indy Johar:
I mean, it’s a great question. I suppose my first answer to this as I resist this question because I think this should be the imagination of everyone rather than imagination of you and I. I think this is a pathway to a new way of being, a new way of becoming in the world. I think the transformation is not just in know ourselves, not just as a sort of an idea of what the world looks like, but it’s a new way of how we manifest in the world, how we exist in the world and that to me is profound in a deeper sense.

Carl Schlyter: 
I mean, I totally agree with you. I don’t believe in the constant fixed utopia. It’s pointless to have that because every utopia is a counter reaction to what you perceive as a problem today. Of course, this is a code development procedure, but still people like visions and dreams and sometimes they need help to visualize it. 

Indy Johar:
Look, I think we’re in the middle of a 40 year journey. A 40 year journey were we will go through systemic scarcity over the next 20, 30 years, where if we get this right and we build a new capacity and a new relationship with our planet and the world around us, we will unlock huge new abundance, whether it’s energy or materiality. Also with new cognitive abundances, new intelligences and about our individual intelligence but our relational intelligence. This conversation is only possible because you and I have this conversation. It’s not a function of my brilliance, of your brilliance alone. It’s a function of our relationship. I think and I think we have to start to see the world through a different set of values. So for me, if we can unlock this journey, we can avoid mutually assured destruction and adopt mutually assured renewal. I think we could unlock vast, extraordinary capability that we thought we could just forget too much. I think everything will change around, but also how we relate to will change for the better. 

Carl Schlyter: 
I’m actually happy, you kind of avoided to answer my question because you did it even better than I hoped for, because what you actually did now is like inviting everybody to this co-creative process of imagining it and then delivering on this. That’s probably the best answer you could have given anyway.

Indy Johar:
It is in that and I intentionally do that, and I don’t apologize for that because I sometimes find it worrying that I think the beauty of tomorrow needs to be discovered by everyone and everyone needs to be on the journey of their becoming.  You or I cannot oppose it, and any description that I have will be insufficient to what is possible. That’s just not me being humble, but I just think it’s not just possible. I think some of us are just the scaffold as the bridge builders to a world that I think is beyond our imagination right now. That’s okay. I think let’s admit it’s beyond our imagination. I can tell you for certain that these fundamental shifts of moving for periods of control, to periods of learning, the new theories of relationship with the world will transform everything around us, everything including how we exist and how we exist of the world with each other. That’s an extraordinary level. 

Externalities and their impacts

Carl Schlyter: 
We also mentioned little about the externalities and how do you define externalities and how can we reduce the impact on them?

Indy Johar:
Yeah, I mean, because it’s one of those simple words, but actually, you know, you’re right to ask the question because let’s go back to the can of coke. The can of Coke is designed. You know, when the aluminum was dug out, it was ecological damage done, which was not typically priced the carbon effects of the kind of biodiversity losses of the price really. If you then look at actually the CO2 that was released from the hydrocarbons that took the bauxite out for land, actually that was probably not priced in terms of the CO2 damage. We know that one tonne of CO2, if you did a true, true cost analysis, could be something in the region of €27,000 if you get true cost damage in terms of the global world. So, when you start to look about but that was not priced the damage to the water systems in terms of extraction, the mobility costs of moving those cans of coke, all those cans of soda around the country, both the CO2 release, the can unpriced in the system.  If you looked at the addiction value of actually caffeine and its effects on addiction and sugar levels and the health care cost on the system. So where’s the can of coke you buy for $0.99 actually all those other costs are unpriced. The problem is all those micro costs are actually now self-terminating us just whether it’s the cost of our health care system or its cost of CO2 damage and climate change damage, what’s the cost of biological diversity losses that we see now? Every can of coke is a micro contributor, but when you imagine everything is doing that, virtually every chocolate bar you buy, every food that you buy, every white goods that you buy, it’s externalizing those costs. Those externalities are now accumulating to such order that they’re driving large scale losses, whether it’s our health, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s biodiversity. We’re in the middle of a sixth largest extinction the planet’s ever seen. These are extraordinary effects generated by micro primitive behaviors or planetary scale. The problem in history was we could largely ignore this. We were relatively small previous 1970s.Our impacts were relatively small to the to the planet. Since the 1970s our impacts have been vast relative to the planet. Those feedbacks, those externalities are not feeding back into us and driving the damage. Thank you. You just completely murdered the theory of competitive advantages and explain the externalization, power-advantage rather. Exactly!

The flaws of the financial system

Carl Schlyter: 
But when you talk about system change, most of the talk we have today is about other aspects than the purely financial or economical. What do you see as the fundamental flaws of the financial system?

Indy Johar:
I mean, at a fundamental level I would say it’s the centralized production of money is the real part because it also creates the centralized theory of value and thereby creates a centralized theory of where portfolios of value understood. I think that’s one aspect of it. The second aspect of it is that I think we’re living in a world where that risk that I was talking about is long priced in the system. We’ve got risks which are on price as a result of that big block price. There is no provisions made for those risks on balance sheet and thereby there’s no investment possible to be able to manage those risks.3rd I think are public built. It’s useful decision making capacity. So for example, there is I don’t know of any company that is running carbon treasury function on its balance sheet. I don’t know local authority that’s running, or municipality, that’s running a carbon treasury function. So how do you build a carbon treasury to look at those embodied carbons we aren’t running material balance sheet of our places so looking at materials that we own that we own of the liabilities of the value of those things over time. Our incentives are miscarried. I think that all of our risk is fractured into individual discrete factors. So preference to be able to micro hedge those risks as a opposed to financially hedge those risks as opposed to naturally hedge those risk So how do you create pooling capacities around those risk frameworks. I think from a monetary level I think there’s a whole. bunch of questions that we don’t have the capacity of investing in building the capacity, but large scale quasi infrastructure level project puts water systems renewal, river systems renewal, whether it’s tree canopies of cities or the collective intelligence of a city. We’re not investing in the next generation assets in the 21st century because we don’t have the asset codes for that reality. We don’t have the public balance sheets in the right way. I think there’s a structural reform required of the kind of financial landscape in order for capital flow more effectively. It goes at every one of those levels. So deep financial reform is going to be necessary to build to drive this reality.

Carl Schlyter: 
And even if you do that, we still, even if you successfully would have a proper accounting of the carbon and tier one, two and three emissions, i.e. The whole value chain of your production, still you would not account for biodiversity impact and social impacts nationally and globally. So you really need to set the whole financial framework in a new setting then?

Indy Johar:
Exactly, and I think that’s going to come at us through crisis more than anything else as the fundamental start to become more and more fragile. I think this is some of this reality know, remember in the Industrial Revolution, the Industrial Revolution was driven by bills of exchange, bills of exchange were distributed money formation and distributed money formation allows for value to be understood on a local level rather than centralized level. I think we’re going to see radical new technologies for our theory of money that are emerging .Bitcoin is just is just a poem for the future. It’s a sort of a practiced practice trend. I think we’re in the middle of a new transformation. At the same time, you’ve got central bank currencies, digital currencies coming today, which actually could be very healthy undermining of democratic capacities of societies. We are in a middle of a war between the massive centralization of command and control economies. How do you build new forms of democratic money formation, which I think is critical that is going to rebuild that whole democratic society and the distributed forms of value, which is really essential for the complex emerging world. I think these things are all on the table and they are at the monetary level as well as the risk level and every other kind of stage I’ve spoken about earlier

Alternative currencies

Carl Schlyter: 
Yeah. I mean, you mentioned Bitcoin. We have another episode in this podcast here, with Ann Pettifor and she was really worried about the energy impact and other negative aspects of cryptocurrencies. But, if I may enlarge your concept of alternative currencies, there are currencies that are within their own construction providing public good. The L issue in Lisbon, is created only if people actually do material recycling in a better way, or the Colorado dollar, where you have the where you have the construction of social value in the money creation process. So if we talk more about those, it would be less, you know, conflict about them.

Indy Johar:
But I think we’re going to see kind of tradable water rights tokens and so quasi money becoming more and more real. Especially if it could be dynamically badged against the universe currency, it becomes tradable. I think there’s been all sorts of iterations that are going to come to the table are essentially a key part of it as we can achieve distributed, decentralized, the provenance of those mechanisms and the trustability of those mechanisms. That’s a key part of the innovation landscape. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Thank you.

Carl Schlyter: 
Well, thank you so much Indy for having this discussion today. I really hope that people feel inspired and seeing their own possibilities for agency, dreaming, and having a vision of the future that they could, you know, get energy from. So thanks a lot for this.

Indy Johar:
It’s an absolute pleasure and thank you for everything that you’re doing. I think it’s really important that we have these sort of conversations and start to chart actually that deep transformations that are required because I think this is this is a one in a 400 year transition. It’s not a transition of kind of like, you know, since the 1970s.This is a deep structural transformation of our relationship with the world. I think we need to start to have these conversations. This is cultural, it’s institutional, it’s a theory of value. All of these things are being transformed. At the other side of that I think it’s a really extraordinary future for humanity at a planetary level. I think that is an extraordinary moment. Therefore, thank you very much for having this conversation.

Carl Schlyter: 
Thank you.

Indy Johar:
Thank you, my friends.

Indy Johar is an architect and the co-founder of Dark Matter Laboratories, an organisation dedicated to developing new support frameworks for collaborative system change.