Authors: Jeremy Rifkin
A local mother interviewed by the
Guardian
described how electricity has transformed the life of the village. She explained that “now the children can study at night. Before, living here was like being in the jungle. Now we feel as though we are actually part of society.”
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Gram Power, which was chosen by NASA as one of the top ten Clean Tech Innovators around the world in 2011, has since worked with ten other villages, installing microgrids, and expects to bring green electricity to an additional 40,000 villagers in 2014.
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It is also looking to other sources of locally available renewable energy, including geothermal heat and biomass. The company is currently negotiating with the Indian government to extend microgrids to 120 additional villages, bringing power to more than 100,000 households.
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Gram Power is one of a slew of new start-up companies fanning out across rural India, helping local villages establish green microgrids to spread electricity. Husk Power Systems is a start-up company based in Bihar State, where 85 percent of the population is without electricity. The company is burning biomass from rice husks to power 90 local power plants. The power plants use microgrids to transfer electricity to 45,000 rural homes. The typical cost of installing a microgrid for a village of a hundred or so homes is as little as $2,500, allowing the community to pay off the investment in just a few years, after which the marginal cost of generating and delivering each additional kilowatt of electricity is nearly zero.
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As local microgrids come online, they also connect with one another, creating regional networks that eventually link up to the national grids, transforming the centralized power structure into a distributed, collaborative, laterally scaled power network. Microgrids are projected to account for more than 75 percent of the revenue for renewable energy generation globally by 2018.
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The proliferation of microgrids in the poorest regions of the developing world, powered by locally generated renewable energy, provides the essential electricity to run 3D printers, which can produce the tools and machinery needed to establish self-sufficient and sustainable twenty-first-century communities.
A Neo-Gandhian World
Watching the transformation taking place in India and around the world, I can’t help but reflect on Mahatma Gandhi’s insight set forth more than 70 years ago. When asked about his economic vision, Gandhi replied, “Mass production, certainly, but not based on force. . . . It is mass production, but mass production in people’s own homes.”
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E. F. Schumacher summarized Gandhi’s concept as “not mass production but production by the masses.”
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Gandhi went on to outline an economic model that has even
more relevance for India and the rest of the world today than when he first articulated it.
Gandhi’s views ran counter to the wisdom of the day. In a world where politicians, business leaders, economists, academics, and the general public were extolling the virtues of industrialized production, Gandhi demurred, suggesting that “there is a tremendous fallacy behind Henry Ford’s reasoning.” Gandhi believed that mass production, with its vertically integrated enterprises and inherent tendencies to centralize economic power and monopolize markets, would have dire consequences for humanity.
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He warned that such a situation
would be found to be disastrous. . . . Because while it is true that you will be producing things in innumerable areas, the power will come from one selected centre. . . . It would place such a limitless power in one human agency that I dread to think of it. The consequence, for instance, of such a control of power would be that I would be dependent on that power for light, water, even air, and so on. That, I think, would be terrible.
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Gandhi understood that mass production was designed to use more sophisticated machines to produce more goods with less labor and at a cheaper cost. He saw, however, an inherent contradiction in the organizational logic of mass production that limited its promise. Gandhi reasoned that “if all countries adopted the system of mass production, there would not be a big enough market for their products. Mass production must then come to a stop.”
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Like Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Wassily Leontief, Robert Heilbroner, and other distinguished economists, he argued that the capitalists’ desire for efficiency and productivity would result in an unyielding drive to replace human labor with automation, leaving more and more people unemployed and without sufficient purchasing power to buy the products being produced.
Gandhi’s alternative proposal was local production by the masses in their own homes and neighborhoods—what he called
Swadeshi.
The idea behind
Swadeshi
was to “bring work to the people and not people to the work.”
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He asked rhetorically, “If you multiply individual production to millions of times, would it not give you mass production on a tremendous scale?”
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Gandhi fervently believed that “production and consumption must be reunited”—what we today call prosumers—and that it was only realizable if most production took place locally and much of it, but not all, was consumed locally.
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Gandhi was a keen observer of the power relations that governed the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. He watched the British industrial machine swarm over the Indian subcontinent, devouring its rich natural resources and impoverishing its citizenry to feed the consumer appetites of
a wealthy elite and a growing middle class in Britain. He saw millions of his countrymen languish at the very bottom of a global industrial pyramid that wielded power from the top. It is no wonder he railed against a centralized capitalist system.
Gandhi was equally disenchanted with the Communist experiment in the Soviet Union, which gave lip service to the principle of communal solidarity while exercising an even more rigid centralized control over the industrialization process than its capitalist foes.
Gandhi never consciously articulated the concept that communication/energy matrices determine the way economic power is organized and distributed in every civilization. He intuited, however, that the industrial organization of society—be it under the aegis of a capitalist or socialist regime—brought with it a set of guiding assumptions, including centralized control over the production and distribution process; the championing of a utilitarian concept of human nature; and the pursuit of ever more material consumption as an end in itself. His philosophy, on the other hand, emphasized decentralized economic production in self-sufficient local communities; the pursuit of craft labor over industrial-machine labor; and the envisioning of economic life as a moral and spiritual quest rather than a materialist pursuit. For Gandhi, the antidote to rampant economic exploitation and greed is a selfless commitment to community.
Gandhi’s ideal economy starts in the local village and extends outward to the world. He wrote:
My idea of village
Swaraj
is that it is a complete republic, independent of its neighbors for its own vital wants, and yet interdependent for many others which dependence is a necessity.
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He eschewed the notion of a pyramidically organized society in favor of what he called “oceanic circles,” made up of communities of individuals embedded within broader communities that ripple out to envelop the whole of humanity. Gandhi argued that
independence must begin at the bottom . . . every village has to be self-sustained and capable of managing its affairs even to the extent of defending itself against the whole world. . . . This does not exclude dependence on and willing help from neighbours or from the world. It will be a free and voluntary play of mutual forces. . . . In this structure composed of innumerable villages, there will be ever widening, never ascending circles. Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose center will be the individual. . . . Therefore the outermost circumference will not wield power to crush the inner circle but will give strength to all within and derive its own strength from it.”
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In championing this vision, Gandhi also distanced himself from classical economic theory. Adam Smith’s assertion that it is in the nature of each individual to pursue his or her own self-interest in the marketplace and that “it is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in view,” was anathema to Gandhi.
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He believed in a virtuous economy in which the community’s interest superseded individual self-interest and argued that anything less depreciates the happiness of the human race.
For Gandhi, happiness is not to be found in the amassing of individual wealth but in living a compassionate and empathic life. He went so far as to suggest that “real happiness and contentment . . . consists not in the multiplication but, in the deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants,” so that one might be free to live a more committed life in fellowship with others.
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He also bound his theory of happiness to a responsibility to the planet. Nearly a half century before sustainability came into vogue, Gandhi declared that “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not enough for every man’s greed.”
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Gandhi’s ideal economy bears a striking philosophical likeness to the Third Industrial Revolution and the accompanying Collaborative Age. His view of self-sufficient village communities joining together and rippling outward into wider oceanic circles that extend to all of humanity mirrors the community microgrids that connect in ever more distributed and collaborative lateral networks in the TIR economic paradigm. His concept of happiness as the optimization of one’s relationships in shared communities rather than the autonomous pursuit of individual self-interest in the marketplace reflects the new dream of quality of life that is the hallmark of a Collaborative Age. Finally, Gandhi’s belief that nature is a finite resource imbued with intrinsic value that requires stewardship rather than pillage fits the new realization that every human being’s life is ultimately judged by the impact of his or her ecological footprint on the biosphere in which we all dwell.
While Gandhi espoused the idea of lateral economic power and understood that the Earth’s environment is itself the overarching community that supports all life on the planet, he was forced to defend his philosophy of local economic power in an industrial era whose communication/energy matrix favored centralized, top-down management of commercial practices and the vertical integration of economic activity. That left him in the untenable position of championing traditional crafts in local subsistence communities that had kept the masses of Indian people mired in poverty and isolation over eons of history.
What Gandhi failed to perceive is that an even deeper contradiction lies at the heart of the capitalist system that would make possible the very distributed and collaborative laterally scaled economy he espoused—that is, the steadfast pursuit of new technologies whose increased efficiencies and productivity are driving marginal costs to nearly zero, making many
goods and services potentially free and an economy of abundance a real possibility.
No doubt Gandhi would have been equally surprised to learn that capitalism’s optimum point of ideal productivity at near zero marginal cost would be realized by introducing a new communication technology, a new energy regime, and an accompanying production-and-distribution model that is organized in a distributed and collaborative fashion and scaled peer to peer and laterally, allowing millions of people to become prosumers—not unlike the concept of production by the masses that he envisioned.
Today, the IoT infrastructure provides the means to advance the Gandhian economic vision, lifting hundreds of millions of Indians out of abject poverty and into a sustainable quality of life. Gandhi’s quest for the good economy, brought forward and embedded in the Internet of Things, can serve as a powerful new narrative not only for India, but for emerging nations around the world in search of a just and sustainable future.
Chapter Seven
MOOCs and a Zero Marginal Cost Education
A
zero marginal cost society, in which scarcity has been replaced by abundance, is a far different world than the one we’re accustomed to. Preparing students for an era in which capitalist markets play a secondary role to the Collaborative Commons is beginning to force a rethinking of the educational process itself. The pedagogy of learning is undergoing a radical overhaul. So too is the way education is financed and delivered. The near zero marginal cost phenomenon has penetrated deeply into the fabric of higher education in just the past two years with massive open online courses bringing the marginal cost of securing college credits to near zero for millions of students.
The capitalist era enshrined a model of teaching designed to prepare students to be skilled industrial workers. The classroom was transformed into a microcosm of the factory. Students were thought of as analogous to machines. They were conditioned to follow commands, learn by repetition, and perform efficiently. The teacher was akin to a factory foreman, handing out standardized assignments that required set answers in a given time frame. Learning was compartmentalized into isolated silos. Education was supposed to be useful and pragmatic. The “why” of things was less discussed than the “how” of things. The goal was to turn out productive employees.
The One-Room Schoolhouse with Two Billion Students
The transition from the capitalist era to the Collaborative Age is altering the pedagogy of the classroom. The authoritarian, top-down model
of instruction is beginning to give way to a more collaborative learning experience. Teachers are shifting from lecturers to facilitators. Imparting knowledge is becoming less important than creating critical-learning skills. Students are encouraged to think more holistically. A premium is placed on inquiry over memorization.
In the traditional industrial classroom, questioning the authority of the teacher is strictly forbidden and sharing information and ideas among students is labeled cheating. Children quickly learn that knowledge is power, and a valuable resource one acquires to secure an advantage over others upon graduation in a fiercely competitive marketplace.
In the Collaborative Age, students will come to think of knowledge as a shared experience among a community of peers. Students learn together as a cohort in a shared-knowledge community. The teacher acts as a guide, setting up inquiries and allowing students to work in small-group environments. The goal is to stimulate collaborative creativity, the kind young people experience when engaged in many of the social spaces of the Internet. The shift from hierarchical power, lodged in the hands of the teacher, to lateral power, established across a learning community, is tantamount to a revolution in pedagogy.
While the conventional classroom treated knowledge as objective, isolated facts, in the collaborative classroom, knowledge is regarded as the collective meanings we attach to our experiences. Students are encouraged to tear down the walls that separate academic disciplines and to think in a more integrated fashion. Interdisciplinary and multicultural studies prepare students to become comfortable entertaining different perspectives and more adept at searching out synergies between phenomena.
The idea of learning as an autonomous private experience and the notion of knowledge as an acquisition to be treated as a form of exclusive property made sense in a capitalist environment that defined human behavior in similar terms. In the Collaborative Age, learning is regarded as a crowdsourcing process and knowledge is treated as a publically shared good, available to all, mirroring the emerging definition of human behavior as deeply social and interactive in nature. The shift from a more authoritarian style of learning to a more lateral learning environment better prepares today’s students to work, live, and flourish in tomorrow’s collaborative economy.
The new collaborative pedagogy is being applied and practiced in schools and communities around the world. The educational models are designed to free students from the private space of the traditional enclosed classroom and allow them to learn in multiple open Commons, in virtual space, the public square, and in the biosphere.
Classrooms around the world are connecting in real time, via Skype and other programs, and collaborating on joint assignments. Students separated by thousands of miles pair off in virtual-cohort teams, study together, make presentations, debate with one another, and even get graded
together. The global collaborative classroom is quickly becoming a reality. Skype in the Classroom, a free online community, has already registered 60,447 teachers in its global classroom project and has set a goal of connecting 1 million classrooms across the world.
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Collaborative Classrooms, another Internet learning environment, allows thousands of teachers to cocreate curricula online and share the best lesson plans with one another—for free—in a global education Commons. More than 117,000 teachers are currently sharing open-source curricula, bringing learning communities together in a borderless global classroom.
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The learning experience is not only beaming up from the enclosed classroom into the virtual spaces of the Internet, but also seeping out into the surrounding neighborhoods that make up the public square. Today, millions of American students in elementary and secondary schools and in the nation’s colleges and universities engage in “service learning” in the community. Service learning combines formal instruction with involvement in the civil society.
Service learning is predicated on the assumption that learning is never a solitary affair but ultimately a shared experience and a collaborative venture that is best practiced in real communities where people live and work. Students generally volunteer in nonprofit organizations where they learn by serving the larger interests of the community of which they are a part. This experiential-based learning provides students with a broader focus. They come to see that learning is more about the search for community than merely the amassing of proprietary knowledge to advance one’s self-interest.
Students might learn a foreign language by serving in a neighborhood with a large immigrant population that speaks that particular tongue. If they are learning about the dynamics of poverty in their social studies class, they might volunteer at a food bank or homeless shelter. At the Einstein Middle School in Shoreline, Washington, four teachers representing the core subjects of social studies, English, math, and science brought together 120 eighth-grade students in a collaborative interdisciplinary service-learning project to study the issue of poverty and homelessness. The social studies teacher had the students enact an Oxfam hunger banquet and brought in speakers from several local agencies that assist community residents that live below the poverty line to acquaint them with the complex issues surrounding poverty. Students then volunteered once a week for five weeks at eight sites in downtown Seattle that serve underprivileged communities. The students helped prepare meals and collected and distributed food and other needed items to homeless people and engaged them in conversation, developing personal relationships. In their English classes, students read
Slake’s Limbo
,
a story about a young boy who runs away from home and lives in the tunnels of the New York City subway system, where he experiences what it’s like to be homeless and hungry. In their math classes, students examined the economics of poverty. The eighth graders followed up with written reports about a specific local and
global aspect of poverty, published zines, and organized an evening exhibit on issues relating to poverty for the students and the community.
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By extending the learning environment to the public Commons, students come to understand that the collaborative experience is the heart and soul of what it means to be a highly social creature endowed with an innate empathic capacity and a yearning to be part of a larger community.
The notion of a learning community is being extended not only to the edges of virtual space and to neighborhoods, but also to the farthest reaches of the biosphere. Students are learning that the biosphere is the indivisible Commons within which all our other communities are embedded. After nearly two centuries of industrial curricula that emphasized the idea of the Earth as a passive reservoir of useful resources to be harnessed, exploited, manufactured, and transformed into productive capital and private property for individual gain, a new collaborative curricula is beginning to re-envision the biosphere as a Commons made up of myriad relationships that act in symbiotic ways to allow the whole of life to flourish on Earth.
Students at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay spend two weeks of the academic semester doing hands-on fieldwork in tropical conservation in the Carara National Park in Costa Rica. The students work with biologists and park staff to inventory local flora and fauna and monitor ecological conditions in the park. Along with their more technical pursuits, students also engage in unskilled work, repairing nature trails, building bridges, constructing biological field stations, and planting trees in the town abutting the park.
The service-learning experience is designed to both immerse the students in the complex biological dynamics of a tropical ecosystem and provide them an opportunity to assist in its management and preservation.
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Many of the nation’s high schools are engaged in service-learning programs to protect the environment. At Exeter High School in New Hampshire, students monitoring air quality on school grounds and in adjoining neighborhoods found that car and bus idling had a significant impact on air quality and subsequently mobilized the community to enact a no-idling policy, which improved the air quality in and around the campus.
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In these examples, and countless other environmental-service programs, students are both learning about the myriad ways human activity impacts the environment and what remedial measures are needed to reverse the damage and restore local ecosystems back to health. Many students come away from such efforts with a very personal sense of responsibility for stewarding the biosphere community. A student in the Costa Rican service-learning program reflected on how the experience deeply affected his worldview and personal behavior:
It is extremely important to protect the rainforest in Costa Rica and preserve the rich biodiversity of the area as well as keeping the Earth’s
resources plentiful and pristine. Every day I rationalize in my head what my actions are compromising in the world and I try to limit my impact on the environment.
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The reductionist approach to learning that characterized an industrial era based on isolating and privatizing phenomena is giving way to a more systemic learning experience designed to understand the subtle relationships that bind phenomena together in larger wholes. In learning environments all over the world, students are being prepared to live in an open-biosphere Commons. More and more curricula are emphasizing our species’ deep biophilia connection to nature, exposing students to the diverse forms of life that inhabit the great oceans and land masses, teaching them about ecosystem dynamics, and helping them reframe the human experience to live sustainably within the requisites of the biosphere.
These and other educational initiatives are transforming the learning experience from one that emphasized living in a closed world of private property relations to one that prepares students to live in the open Commons of virtual space, the public square, and the biosphere.
Service learning has grown from a marginal activity at a handful of educational institutions 25 years ago to a centerpiece of the American educational process. A recent survey of service learning in U.S. colleges and universities by College Compact gives some idea of both the level of commitment that institutions of higher learning are putting into service-learning curricula as well as the impact that open-Commons learning is having on the communities where students serve. The report, which covered 1,100 colleges and universities, found that 35 percent of the student body participated in service-learning programs. Half of the colleges and universities surveyed require service learning as part of their core curriculum for at least one major, and 93 percent of the schools reported offering service-learning courses. In 2009 college students alone contributed the equivalent of $7.96 billion worth of volunteer hours in service to the community.
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Equally impressive, studies of elementary schools and high schools conducted in different regions of the country report that service learning improved students’ problem-solving skills and understanding of cognitive complexity as well as their performance in classroom work and on standardized tests, as compared to students who did not take part in service-learning programs.
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The Decline of the Brick-and-Mortar Classroom
Education, like roads and mass transport, postal services, and health care, has remained, for the most part, in the public domain in industrialized countries and is treated as a public good administered by government.
The United States has been a partial exception in the delivery of education. Public primary and secondary schools have been the rule, but
nonprofit private academies have long been part of the mix. Of late, profit-making schools, and especially charter schools, have entered the marketplace. In higher education, public and private nonprofit colleges and universities have dominated the landscape, with for-profit institutions playing only a small, insignificant role.
But now the escalating cost of higher education has created a crisis with millions of students increasingly unable to pay for a four-year college degree, which can cost up to $50,000 a year in the elite not-for-profit colleges and universities and as much as $10,000 per year in publicly funded institutions of higher learning.
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Students who are able to secure college loans—even with government assistance—face the prospect of massive debt that will burden them well into midlife.