this is a tiny house now if you were to
gauge based on the number of tell
rims that are on television these days
about tiny houses you might think that
everybody wants a tiny house well
whether they want a tiny house or not
city planners are delighted that people
are looking forward to living in smaller
spaces only their idea is a little
different they’re thinking something
more like this
this is a micro apartment building and
they’re going up all over the world in
large cities typically located near
public transportation
now it’s ironic that city planners love
micro apartments when you consider that
a typical micro apartment is not that
much larger than a typical prison cell
here you see a comparison of a typical
micro apartment a so-called net flat in
Hong Kong and a recommended minimum size
for a prison cell now we’re not just
getting used to living in tiny spaces
we’re also developing a whole vernacular
around co-working who living the gig
economy and last but not least mobility
as a service now in the meantime the
super yachts are getting bigger this is
the azam super yacht it’s about 540 feet
long about two football fields and it’s
one of many that you see in Yap marinas
all around the world
well the plutocrats in general are
having a pretty good decade based on the
latest reports there are about 2,200
billionaires accounting for about 9
trillion dollars in wealth so long story
short the rich are getting richer the
poor are getting poorer and the rest of
us are shearing like never before now it
doesn’t have to be this way we can
actually reverse this trend but in order
to understand how to get out of this
mess we have to understand how we got
into this mess in the first place so
what’s really going on here well if you
go back to the 1970s something happen
for years productivity and wages rose in
lockstep
but around 1970 four or five something
dramatic happened labour no longer was
able to participate in the gains that
were being derived from ongoing progress
productivity now as a result what began
to happen was a concentration of income
into an ever shrinking percentage of the
population and this is not a local
phenomena it was a global phenomena just
different degrees what was also going on
was a very interesting pattern around
public net wealth as you can see nations
were progressively selling off assets as
well as borrowing ever larger amounts of
money resulting in a rapid decline in
public net wealth sometimes even to the
point of negative net public wealth now
part of the reason why this was
happening was because of the rapid race
to the bottom when it comes to corporate
tax rates corporate tax rates that have
declined to a level that they no longer
were capable of sustaining the social
contract that many nations had been
accustomed to using now it’s not
entirely surprising that corporate tax
rates would be pursued by corporations
after all in the words of Edward Thurlow
corporations have neither a body to be
kicked
nor soul to be damned now part of the
thing that made it possible for nations
to borrow so substantially was the
opportunity to borrow at very low
interest rates which is fine if you’re a
nation in need of public borrowing but
if you are somebody living on fixed
income it presents a challenge now it
wasn’t just governments that were
racking up massive amounts of debt all
of us were racking up unprecedent
amounts of debt and some of that debt
was particularly insidious student loan
debt for example in the United States
rose to a level where it was not
uncommon for newly minted university
graduates to have hundreds of thousands
of dollars of non dischargeable stew
loan debt that they would be paying off
for the rest of their lives another
category of borrowing that was also
quite insidious is the practice of
payday loan lending now many people
don’t realize that payday loans can have
interest rates of up to 600 percent per
year and for many people being under the
burden of these payday loans was a
source of extreme concern so in the
words of pibbly of Cirrus death is the
slavery of the free now rational people
do rational things when you consider for
a moment the possibility that someone
took on death presumably they had an
expectation that the future would be
better than the past well let’s talk
about the future in case you missed it
the robots are coming
and moreover McKinsey is reporting that
an estimated 400 million jobs will be
lost by the year 2030
due to progress on AI and automation now
something happened very recently in the
news that was quite unsettling but many
of you might already have detected it
for the first time since this study was
being done in 1960 the people under age
35 are now less optimistic about the
future than age 55 and over you can see
a very steep drop so this is all pretty
troubling particularly if you’re a youth
so I have a suggestion let’s play a game
you probably remember this game some of
you even in this audience play that game
routinely now if you know how to play
the game and you play by the rules you
can actually prevail over you’re less
skilled opponents now imagine there was
a game called Fatah cracy plutocracy is
a game where there are actually no
winners because the game never ends and
the object of the game is to create as
many losers as possible now I don’t know
if there are
a lot of people playing this game but I
know there are a lot of losers
now when you have a lot of losers in a
community sometimes people get inventive
about what could we do to solve the
problem
many people among policymakers are
talking about something that you’ve come
across perhaps called universal basic
income no work free stuff what could
possibly go wrong
well Davy Crockett said a government big
enough to give you everything that you
want is also big enough to take away
everything that you have and whether or
not you have an abundance of physical
possessions what we all have is
sovereignty the freedom to choose where
we live what we do and what we believe
now in the pursuit of sovereignty some
people are getting quite inventive you
have for example the digital nomad
phenomena there are about seven or eight
million digital nomads today according
to various estimates now
there’s an expectation that by 2035
there may be as many as even a billion
digital nomads freelancers by another
name but wants to travel itinerant Li
from project to project now that’s an
interesting lifestyle others have chosen
to take a page out of Enron’s PlayBook
setting up entire nations the country of
Li Burland which is only about a
40-minute flight from where we are today
sitting on the border of Serbia and
Croatia is an experiment in sovereignty
a third category of sovereignty pursuing
individuals are folks that are engaging
in the practice of seasteading entire
nations typically on floating objects in
in international waters that are
governed by their own laws now that’s a
lot of effort to go through to find
sovereignty it raises the obvious
question what could we do to restore
sovereignty in the cities where we
already live well there’s a number of
things we could do but to understand the
context of how to do it
you have to think about it from the
standpoint of perhaps how Buckminster
Fuller approached it he said you never
change things by fighting the existing
reality if you really want to change
something build the new model that makes
the existing model obsolete for example
by local they often talk about buying
local but many people are content to buy
local on Wednesdays in the summer at the
farmers market I’m talking about buying
local all the time when you do that
three and a half times more revenue
stays in the local economy second we can
engage in a practice of bypassing the so
called extraction economy many of us use
products and services from the likes of
say Expedia or Amazon or uber or PayPal
well these are examples of the
extraction economy give you a couple of
examples Expedia charges up to 40%
commission for an independent hotelier
they pay the independent hotel your net
60 days after stay uber started out as a
very benign 5% Commission now charges
sometimes 50 percent and even more so
these are examples of an extraction
economy that represent the tax on the
communities that they serve now as we
contemplate thriving sovereign local
economies we also need to be thinking
about capital how will we be able to
provide the businesses in our community
with access to reasonably priced capital
well
peer-to-peer banking public banking as
well as credit unions are all examples
of new forms of banking that restore the
capital flows back into the communities
that need it most
now if we’re going to create a community
minded approach toward reinvestment it’s
also important to do it with the benefit
of community as a behavior as a mindset
and this is really what we’re talking
about here in the context of creating a
culture of co-creation civic engagement
Digital Inclusion these are all examples
of co-creation now if you want to create
a real spirit of shared ownership and
the commitment to doing things for the
long haul even it’s may be painful in
the short run it’s also desirable to
create
shirred ownership now cooperatives are
an example of a form of shared ownership
that can be applied at the local first
level and as we contemplate creating
user experiences that are now first we
can also make it as convenient as it is
to buy on say Amazon or uber or
OpenTable by having this notion of
single sign-on one login that allows you
to access both the services from the
public sector and the private sector now
this isn’t just about convenience it’s
also about reputation you think about
your own experience using services like
eBay where you accrue reputation you
can’t take it with you when we introduce
single sign-on we have the ability to
accrue portable reputation and take it
with us from project to project from
task to task and from community to
community which brings me to the last
point which is about global
interoperability when you think about
your own experience traveling around the
world you probably came across the idea
of sister cities well these were
typically described in the context of
cultural exchange relics being passed
back and forth a nice little displays
statues and whatnot well in the digital
age it’s time to think further about
global interoperability in a digital
sense your login that works in your
hometown might also work in the next
town over or a town on another side of
the world so what if we could bring this
type of capability to every city town
and village around the world and could
make it possible to do it in a way that
every city could afford it what if we
could make practices like buying local
and sharing and co-creating a part of
the operating system of the city doing
away with the extraction economy that
has not served humanity nearly as well
as what we had hoped the extraction
economy effectively becoming relics of
an era gone by now to do this will
require some innovation and there are a
couple of themes to draw your attention
to the first is
watching now there’s a lot of hype about
blockchain and many of you may be
thinking it’s a flash in the pan this
too shall pass
blockchain is not about cryptocurrencies
blockchain is about reinventing the way
the internet works the distributed
internet will empower communities to
build entire new trust economies that
can overcome the traditional corruption
and concerns doubts and lack of trust
that is existed that has necessitated
creating middleware that has created
these sorts of monopolistic profit
maximizing brands that we’ve come to
know and love as a trusted proxy now
blockchain is far from done innovating
we are in the most early stages next
generation blockchain technologies will
provide a framework for dramatically
higher speed and throughput lower cost
and greater ability to design entire
ecosystems for the communities where we
live and work now
another development to draw your
attention to is platform cooperativism
these are shared hosted applications
that are used in communities the way to
think about it is probably best
illustrated with an example Austin Texas
built a product called ride Austin
why did they do it well uber and lyft
were becoming evermore extracting not
just putting the taxi business out of
operation but also going about creating
unfair arrangements between driver and
passenger so they created their own
solution it was a cooperative it was
called right Austin and it still
operates today but what if we could go
and take that idea and apply it to
everything now I run a company called
digital town digital town is a big idea
the basic idea of digital town is this
every city becomes its own Google its
own Amazon its own Expedia Airbnb
OpenTable PayPal and coinbase all in one
branded in the identity of the city
owned by the citizens and interoperable
between cities around the world now to
the casual observer digital town might
appear like a typical
Travel field guide but in fact it’s much
more every citizen gets a permanent
digital address you have the ability to
be identified and verified and you’re in
every citizen gets a free smart wallet
you have the ability to pay peer-to-peer
peuta merchants peer to government all
in one branded in the identity of the
city every merchant gets a free
storefront which you can sell across
retail services dining and launching
both online and offline and pay anyone
anywhere in both cryptocurrencies and
conventional currencies co-creation
becomes a habit we can design projects
anybody can start one don’t wait for
your government to do it for you you can
do it all by yourself and bring together
community of contributors that will
co-create quality of life for the
community will you listen work and make
the framework in place to allow the
citizens to own it this is through a
blockchain based security token called
city shares every city in the world is
tokenized in the form of City shares and
last but not least interoperability the
ideas that are conceived in one part of
the world readily be applied to every
other part of the world your single
sign-on that works for ride share bike
share and public transportation in one
part of the world works everywhere else
so in summary I believe the future is
bright on the one hand the the UN is
forecasting that by 2050 70 % of
humanity is going to be living in small
urban centers
now these tightly packed urban centers
when you consider for a moment that
there are three point seven million
cities towns and villages currently in
existence and only 44 hundred have
100,000 or more that must mean that
there going to be a whole lot of micro
apartments now I believe in a different
future I believe in a future of people
centric cities I believe in a future of
thriving sovereign local economies I
believe in the future of communities
that co-create abundance but most
importantly I believe in you and I hope you do too
gauge based on the number of tell
rims that are on television these days
about tiny houses you might think that
everybody wants a tiny house well
whether they want a tiny house or not
city planners are delighted that people
are looking forward to living in smaller
spaces only their idea is a little
different they’re thinking something
more like this
this is a micro apartment building and
they’re going up all over the world in
large cities typically located near
public transportation
now it’s ironic that city planners love
micro apartments when you consider that
a typical micro apartment is not that
much larger than a typical prison cell
here you see a comparison of a typical
micro apartment a so-called net flat in
Hong Kong and a recommended minimum size
for a prison cell now we’re not just
getting used to living in tiny spaces
we’re also developing a whole vernacular
around co-working who living the gig
economy and last but not least mobility
as a service now in the meantime the
super yachts are getting bigger this is
the azam super yacht it’s about 540 feet
long about two football fields and it’s
one of many that you see in Yap marinas
all around the world
well the plutocrats in general are
having a pretty good decade based on the
latest reports there are about 2,200
billionaires accounting for about 9
trillion dollars in wealth so long story
short the rich are getting richer the
poor are getting poorer and the rest of
us are shearing like never before now it
doesn’t have to be this way we can
actually reverse this trend but in order
to understand how to get out of this
mess we have to understand how we got
into this mess in the first place so
what’s really going on here well if you
go back to the 1970s something happen
for years productivity and wages rose in
lockstep
but around 1970 four or five something
dramatic happened labour no longer was
able to participate in the gains that
were being derived from ongoing progress
productivity now as a result what began
to happen was a concentration of income
into an ever shrinking percentage of the
population and this is not a local
phenomena it was a global phenomena just
different degrees what was also going on
was a very interesting pattern around
public net wealth as you can see nations
were progressively selling off assets as
well as borrowing ever larger amounts of
money resulting in a rapid decline in
public net wealth sometimes even to the
point of negative net public wealth now
part of the reason why this was
happening was because of the rapid race
to the bottom when it comes to corporate
tax rates corporate tax rates that have
declined to a level that they no longer
were capable of sustaining the social
contract that many nations had been
accustomed to using now it’s not
entirely surprising that corporate tax
rates would be pursued by corporations
after all in the words of Edward Thurlow
corporations have neither a body to be
kicked
nor soul to be damned now part of the
thing that made it possible for nations
to borrow so substantially was the
opportunity to borrow at very low
interest rates which is fine if you’re a
nation in need of public borrowing but
if you are somebody living on fixed
income it presents a challenge now it
wasn’t just governments that were
racking up massive amounts of debt all
of us were racking up unprecedent
amounts of debt and some of that debt
was particularly insidious student loan
debt for example in the United States
rose to a level where it was not
uncommon for newly minted university
graduates to have hundreds of thousands
of dollars of non dischargeable stew
loan debt that they would be paying off
for the rest of their lives another
category of borrowing that was also
quite insidious is the practice of
payday loan lending now many people
don’t realize that payday loans can have
interest rates of up to 600 percent per
year and for many people being under the
burden of these payday loans was a
source of extreme concern so in the
words of pibbly of Cirrus death is the
slavery of the free now rational people
do rational things when you consider for
a moment the possibility that someone
took on death presumably they had an
expectation that the future would be
better than the past well let’s talk
about the future in case you missed it
the robots are coming
and moreover McKinsey is reporting that
an estimated 400 million jobs will be
lost by the year 2030
due to progress on AI and automation now
something happened very recently in the
news that was quite unsettling but many
of you might already have detected it
for the first time since this study was
being done in 1960 the people under age
35 are now less optimistic about the
future than age 55 and over you can see
a very steep drop so this is all pretty
troubling particularly if you’re a youth
so I have a suggestion let’s play a game
you probably remember this game some of
you even in this audience play that game
routinely now if you know how to play
the game and you play by the rules you
can actually prevail over you’re less
skilled opponents now imagine there was
a game called Fatah cracy plutocracy is
a game where there are actually no
winners because the game never ends and
the object of the game is to create as
many losers as possible now I don’t know
if there are
a lot of people playing this game but I
know there are a lot of losers
now when you have a lot of losers in a
community sometimes people get inventive
about what could we do to solve the
problem
many people among policymakers are
talking about something that you’ve come
across perhaps called universal basic
income no work free stuff what could
possibly go wrong
well Davy Crockett said a government big
enough to give you everything that you
want is also big enough to take away
everything that you have and whether or
not you have an abundance of physical
possessions what we all have is
sovereignty the freedom to choose where
we live what we do and what we believe
now in the pursuit of sovereignty some
people are getting quite inventive you
have for example the digital nomad
phenomena there are about seven or eight
million digital nomads today according
to various estimates now
there’s an expectation that by 2035
there may be as many as even a billion
digital nomads freelancers by another
name but wants to travel itinerant Li
from project to project now that’s an
interesting lifestyle others have chosen
to take a page out of Enron’s PlayBook
setting up entire nations the country of
Li Burland which is only about a
40-minute flight from where we are today
sitting on the border of Serbia and
Croatia is an experiment in sovereignty
a third category of sovereignty pursuing
individuals are folks that are engaging
in the practice of seasteading entire
nations typically on floating objects in
in international waters that are
governed by their own laws now that’s a
lot of effort to go through to find
sovereignty it raises the obvious
question what could we do to restore
sovereignty in the cities where we
already live well there’s a number of
things we could do but to understand the
context of how to do it
you have to think about it from the
standpoint of perhaps how Buckminster
Fuller approached it he said you never
change things by fighting the existing
reality if you really want to change
something build the new model that makes
the existing model obsolete for example
by local they often talk about buying
local but many people are content to buy
local on Wednesdays in the summer at the
farmers market I’m talking about buying
local all the time when you do that
three and a half times more revenue
stays in the local economy second we can
engage in a practice of bypassing the so
called extraction economy many of us use
products and services from the likes of
say Expedia or Amazon or uber or PayPal
well these are examples of the
extraction economy give you a couple of
examples Expedia charges up to 40%
commission for an independent hotelier
they pay the independent hotel your net
60 days after stay uber started out as a
very benign 5% Commission now charges
sometimes 50 percent and even more so
these are examples of an extraction
economy that represent the tax on the
communities that they serve now as we
contemplate thriving sovereign local
economies we also need to be thinking
about capital how will we be able to
provide the businesses in our community
with access to reasonably priced capital
well
peer-to-peer banking public banking as
well as credit unions are all examples
of new forms of banking that restore the
capital flows back into the communities
that need it most
now if we’re going to create a community
minded approach toward reinvestment it’s
also important to do it with the benefit
of community as a behavior as a mindset
and this is really what we’re talking
about here in the context of creating a
culture of co-creation civic engagement
Digital Inclusion these are all examples
of co-creation now if you want to create
a real spirit of shared ownership and
the commitment to doing things for the
long haul even it’s may be painful in
the short run it’s also desirable to
create
shirred ownership now cooperatives are
an example of a form of shared ownership
that can be applied at the local first
level and as we contemplate creating
user experiences that are now first we
can also make it as convenient as it is
to buy on say Amazon or uber or
OpenTable by having this notion of
single sign-on one login that allows you
to access both the services from the
public sector and the private sector now
this isn’t just about convenience it’s
also about reputation you think about
your own experience using services like
eBay where you accrue reputation you
can’t take it with you when we introduce
single sign-on we have the ability to
accrue portable reputation and take it
with us from project to project from
task to task and from community to
community which brings me to the last
point which is about global
interoperability when you think about
your own experience traveling around the
world you probably came across the idea
of sister cities well these were
typically described in the context of
cultural exchange relics being passed
back and forth a nice little displays
statues and whatnot well in the digital
age it’s time to think further about
global interoperability in a digital
sense your login that works in your
hometown might also work in the next
town over or a town on another side of
the world so what if we could bring this
type of capability to every city town
and village around the world and could
make it possible to do it in a way that
every city could afford it what if we
could make practices like buying local
and sharing and co-creating a part of
the operating system of the city doing
away with the extraction economy that
has not served humanity nearly as well
as what we had hoped the extraction
economy effectively becoming relics of
an era gone by now to do this will
require some innovation and there are a
couple of themes to draw your attention
to the first is
watching now there’s a lot of hype about
blockchain and many of you may be
thinking it’s a flash in the pan this
too shall pass
blockchain is not about cryptocurrencies
blockchain is about reinventing the way
the internet works the distributed
internet will empower communities to
build entire new trust economies that
can overcome the traditional corruption
and concerns doubts and lack of trust
that is existed that has necessitated
creating middleware that has created
these sorts of monopolistic profit
maximizing brands that we’ve come to
know and love as a trusted proxy now
blockchain is far from done innovating
we are in the most early stages next
generation blockchain technologies will
provide a framework for dramatically
higher speed and throughput lower cost
and greater ability to design entire
ecosystems for the communities where we
live and work now
another development to draw your
attention to is platform cooperativism
these are shared hosted applications
that are used in communities the way to
think about it is probably best
illustrated with an example Austin Texas
built a product called ride Austin
why did they do it well uber and lyft
were becoming evermore extracting not
just putting the taxi business out of
operation but also going about creating
unfair arrangements between driver and
passenger so they created their own
solution it was a cooperative it was
called right Austin and it still
operates today but what if we could go
and take that idea and apply it to
everything now I run a company called
digital town digital town is a big idea
the basic idea of digital town is this
every city becomes its own Google its
own Amazon its own Expedia Airbnb
OpenTable PayPal and coinbase all in one
branded in the identity of the city
owned by the citizens and interoperable
between cities around the world now to
the casual observer digital town might
appear like a typical
Travel field guide but in fact it’s much
more every citizen gets a permanent
digital address you have the ability to
be identified and verified and you’re in
every citizen gets a free smart wallet
you have the ability to pay peer-to-peer
peuta merchants peer to government all
in one branded in the identity of the
city every merchant gets a free
storefront which you can sell across
retail services dining and launching
both online and offline and pay anyone
anywhere in both cryptocurrencies and
conventional currencies co-creation
becomes a habit we can design projects
anybody can start one don’t wait for
your government to do it for you you can
do it all by yourself and bring together
community of contributors that will
co-create quality of life for the
community will you listen work and make
the framework in place to allow the
citizens to own it this is through a
blockchain based security token called
city shares every city in the world is
tokenized in the form of City shares and
last but not least interoperability the
ideas that are conceived in one part of
the world readily be applied to every
other part of the world your single
sign-on that works for ride share bike
share and public transportation in one
part of the world works everywhere else
so in summary I believe the future is
bright on the one hand the the UN is
forecasting that by 2050 70 % of
humanity is going to be living in small
urban centers
now these tightly packed urban centers
when you consider for a moment that
there are three point seven million
cities towns and villages currently in
existence and only 44 hundred have
100,000 or more that must mean that
there going to be a whole lot of micro
apartments now I believe in a different
future I believe in a future of people
centric cities I believe in a future of
thriving sovereign local economies I
believe in the future of communities
that co-create abundance but most
importantly I believe in you and I hope you do too
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