Interview with James Gein Wong

James (Gien) Wong is co-founder of Stop Reset Go, a global citizen’s collective focusing on sense-making and developing scaleable, bottom-up, rapid whole system change. He is also an action researcher in the commons focusing on commons leverage points including inner transformation, outer transformation and the tight coupling between the two. He has a background in electronic communications, circuit board design and industrial, control systems technology but migrated to nonlinear, social-ecological system intervention design, with a special focus on leverage points, idling resources and social tipping points with the dawning of the crisis humanity faces in the Anthropocene.

See the video of the podcast with James Gein Wong on YoutTube.

What do you see as the most promising ways to resolve the many challenges the world faces today?

There is an enormous range of issues that need to be addressed simultaneously and quickly. What makes it difficult is that we have a shortening action time window and due to many reasons, vast fragmentation and insufficient levels of cooperation. My focus is on 1) collective, inclusive whole-system sensemaking to emerge the necessary wisdom, strategies and leverage points and use that to pilot 2) harmonized, commons-based, humanity-scale rapid whole system change systems.

You are talking about transformation on a civilizational scale and it’s already happening but not fast enough. What ideas emerged out of your sensemaking to accelerate the processes already taking place?

Since we are dealing with a complex system, we need to take an inclusive, multi-dimensional, multi-scale approach. Our current civilization is like a sinking ship with many holes, each one growing larger and new ones appearing at an ever increasing rate. We need system-wide collaboration at every scale and dimension in order to plug these leaks with great efficacy and prevent our civilization from sinking. Hence, in our sensemaking, what has emerged is a multi-dimensional, multi-scale solution, from inner, psychological dimension to outer social dimension, from individual scale, all the way to entire civilization scale. In terms of speed of change, identifying leverage points, social tipping points and identifiying and utilizing idling resources are critical.

Why do you think downscaling the planetary boundaries (PBs) is vital to achieving local, regional, and hence global sustainability?

To properly answer this question requires a little background first. Modern humans are characterized by having a dual nature. You can think of this as two overlapping worlds that we simultaneously co-inhabit, the symbolosphere and the physiosphere (Schumann et al). The symbolosphere is the world of our symbols and the physiosphere the phenomenological world of our senses. Very simplistically, complex issues like climate change are far more meaningful to those who have spent much of their lives in the symbolosphere, working and gaining familiarity with the nuances of symbols, complex scientific instrumentation, complex mathematical formulas and algorithms, science, academia, policy, etc. Of course almost all modern humans, including those without formal education are introduced to the symbolosphere through their upbringing in their culture, where they are introduced to their mother tongue. But billions of people use language in a colloquial way, not a formal, institutional way. It’s been shown over and over again that the knowledge deficit model doesn’t work in changing people’s priorities of climate change. People are loyal to their tribes, and the belief systems of their tribes. In addition, climate change and the sophisticated symbolic constructs that validate it do not trigger the fight or flight response in our default sensory based system that humans have evolved to adapt to. In order to appreciate these sophisticated ideas people must undergo deep institutional enculturation and we don’t have time for that. Subsequently, hyperobject ideas such as “the planet is burning” are foreign and meaningless in the framework of billions of people. For half the planet, daily survival is a far more important issue. Economics is therefore more pressing than Ecology.

With this background, we are now equipped to answer the question. As the name suggests, planetary boundaries relate to the entire planet and while these are critical to provide a global indicator of the current level of earth system parameters, they are normally quite abstract hyperobjects that are beyond the relevance of billions of ordinary people. Recent perturbations in the climate system however, are causing noticeable and disruptive instabilities such as more intense and more frequent extreme weather events, which in turn helps turn an abstract concept into a concrete, experienceable and meaningful one. There is now an opportunity to harness the growing awareness of the immediate threat of climate change to engage ordinary people in system change. One way to mobilize and awaken collective agency is by localizing or downscaling planetary boundaries, associating them with local socio-economic indicators and extreme weather disruption. This is because downscaling them and synchronizing to local socio-economic indicators (ie. achieving local, measurable doughnut economics) translates improvements in local ecological conditions to mitigation of locally experienced extreme weather events and improvement of local economic conditions. Gamifying the downscaled P.B. and doughnut economics of every community on the planet can mobilize the global solidarity needed now for rapid system change. This approach allows the billions of disempowered citizens of the world to drive the rapid change necessary directly and from the bottom, rather than the traditional disempowered default approach of lobbying slow-moving, top-down, incumbent actors, many of whom have too much vested interest tied to the old carbon intensive system. A groundswell bottom-up surge can make the difference to unblock the policy obstacles faced by top down actors.

How is your startup contributing in tackling climate change? What has been done? And what is on the agenda?

Stop Reset Go has performed years of collective, trans-disciplinary sensemaking and from this has developed a provisional multiprong, multi-dimensional, multi-scale, rapid whole system change strategy. I’m hesitant to call it a solution as there are still unknowns and wicked problems don’t have solutions. It needs to be gradually tested and scaled and shown to work and not bring about unintended consequences (progress traps) but by looking at distant connections between radically different disciplines and seeing important relationships normally not explored, we can better understand why certain obstacles seem intractable and why moving beyond them requires novel strategies.Understanding both the long term, anthropological reasons as well as middle and short term factors leading to the polycrisis in modernity helps us to mold the optimal strategy. There is a risk at this time of great transition for different actors at different levels of society to talk past each other. A whole society approach is often advocated but often it is top down actors who are leaders in business, government and civil society that make the decisions. In reality these actors are a small fraction of the global population. We advocate for a truly balanced approach and we recognize that the billions of ordinary people include the bottom half of the planet basically have no voice in the matter. The means simply do not exist to give agency to the major percentage of humanity to determine our collective future.

Recently, it has been pointed out to me by a few people that the World Economic Forum has a project named “The Great Reset”. To clarify, Stop Reset Go existed as a citizen project many years before the WEF Great Reset project. In contrast to the Great Reset project, we focus on the bottom-up, citizen-based, commons-based, peer-to-peer and open source processes that are designed to give agency to ordinary people. We believe that the billions of disempowered ordinary people are a sleeping giant and if we can find a way to trigger them to awake, we could drive the change at the speed necessary.

We see ourselves as providing one important dimension of a multi-dimensional transition strategy. Nobody really knows what the final form of the future will look like, but we are all shaping it together. There is a self-emergent mesh of decentralized actors all cooperating together to accelerate the transition. We are engaged with others in a new kind of fluid collaboration because we all know we can’t do it alone. Many of us are converging to a transition superorganism model of collaboration, in which each independent project sees itself as a cell or specialized organ contributing to forming a larger cohesive body for system change.

We see climate change as part of the larger gestalt of a civilization polycrisis. Indeed, the transgression now of six planetary boundaries validates this. The complexity of our current poly crisis requires us to disentangle multiple threads to find out what’s going on. This process has taken years of hyper-trans-disciplinary action research work and we have collated our findings into an open praxis called Deep Humanity. The crisis did not appear overnight and it requires a careful look at the history of our species at multiple timescales to make sense of the present. We stand on the shoulder of giants, integrating outstanding research across many fields into our own sense-making. Deep Humanity’s intent is to provide accelerated means to shift individual and collective worldviews, paradigms and value systems that Donella Meadows identified as the greatest leverage point in system change. To state the obvious, we as a civilization have outsmarted ourselves. We have engineered our way into a way of life that fundamentally depends on the destruction of nature at scale. Reverse engineering this is no easy task. Even children know that disentangling a ball of yarn is more difficult than tangling it in the first place. Deep Humanity is designed to find the less obvious leverage points.

In wicked problems, often the change that is needed affects the ones who need to make the change. We are even beyond wicked problems, however and into the area of social (and ecological) messes where the number of interacting variables is spiraling out of control. Deep Humanity is, as the name suggests, an open source, sense-making practice of looking deeply into our own humanity in order to understand how we arrived here, both as an individual and as a civilization. Without looking at the anthropological, psychological, behavioral and sociological reasons, political, economic, social and technological explanations alone do not appear to get to the root of the problem. We look at the entangled gestalt of critical topics such as progress and its shadow dance partner, the progress trap; the symbolosphere and the hypnotic spell of language, mortality salience and the fear and depression it generates, the self/other dualism and how it frames so much of our behavior. We are developing individual and collective journeys which will help guide us back to a living appreciation of the profundity and sacredness of being a living and dying human INTERbeing. We see a deep connection between the perennially unresolved predicament of our own individual mortality, and the generally, state-wide lack of support thereof, and the dawning possibility of our civilizational mortality otherwise known as extinction. By taking the Deep Humanity journey, citizens can come to realize that we are at a unique inflection point of our young species history. Having a grasp of that wisdom, individuals can find their agency and their greatest contribution to the role they see themselves playing to shape the future.

To compliment this “inner” strategy,we have also been developing an “outer” one that requires the development of a new kind of participatory framework that will enable ordinary citizens to find their greatest leverage point and contribute in a globally collaborative way to system change. We call this “awakening the sleeping giant”. To succeed, we are developing a software ecosystem that has a number of features to allow for radical and trusted, high efficacy bottom-up collaboration that is primarily designed according to humanistic principles first, with technology playing a subordinate role to the human design. By human design, we go further than the ordinary definition and include anthropology, psychology, sociology, language, history,philosophy and many other fields of the humanities. A number of our colleagues are doing complimentary work in their respective software system projects and we are working in a spirit of collaboration to converge all our diverse work in the near future into a superorganism software system for humanity and owned by humanity.

Working in the commons, we are keenly aware of the need to keep such a system open source, transparent and data privacy ensured. Our contribution is a software system called the Indyweb and spawns a host of associated tools including Indyverse, Individual (a participant), Indyhub (the Indyvidual’s private data repository), Indypub (a public group), Indylab (a sandbox for prototyping). The software features of this ecosystem are: commons-based, peer produced, participant owned data and capabilities, apps born interoperable, webnative (only requires a browser to run), has immutable read and write provenance for publicly shared data (traceability of all public ideas for attribution). Social media today is too shallow, superficial and decontextualized for meaningful, impactful and actionable conversations to take place. The Indyweb will support deep, interconnected and discoverable conversation, promoting symmathesy leading to impact. Since the basic fabric of the Indyweb is web 3 IPFS network, it is designed as a fractal mindgraph, where indyvidual mindgraphs can coalesce in Indypubs and create hyperknowledge networks. Participants own their own data and nobody can use it unless the individual or designated curator provides content id needed to retrieve it from the commons first. Gyuri Lajos, the knowledge architect behind the system calls this an “interpersonal computing” environment in which there is a radical perspective shift akin to the opposite of the Galilean revolution that shifted from a geocentric to a heliocentric view. Interpersonal computing was championed by Steve Jobs. He made it happen but did not make it in the market space. It is the perspective that indyviduals are the centers of their owned information universe and shouldn’t have to go elsewhere to fulfill their computational needs. Each individual acts as an attractor and those needs attract the right applications to them. Each individual is in full control of his/her data as well as which application (s)he selects to use and grant data access to. Individuals have their own private data hub, and groups can have their own as well. The social operating environment is fundamentally designed on philosophical and sociological principles that will increase the efficacy of collaboration as well as mitigate conflict. Gamifying the achievement of disaggregated planetary boundaries / local doughnut economics is integrated into this system of collaboration, dividing each biophysical and socio-economic indicator into many subcategories to allow actors from every part of the community to find their niche. The scalable, people centered peer produced, interpersonal system will enable the formation of geographical and virtual network improvement communities, as computer systems pioneer Douglas Englebart called them, and the network will employ a cosmolocal architecture to enable massive open collaboration and sharing of robust solutions to be shared with anyone on the network. Our aim here is to democratize and rapidly disseminate robust yet fully tinkerable, findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable, exchangeable, malleable, swappable, born interoperable and co-evolvable systems to work within and offer solutions by giving everyone access to working designs. In other words, to aspire to live up to the goal of cosmolocal clean production, what’s light (data) we share, and what’s heavy (physical objects) we produce locally. Sharing open designs with the rest of the planet enables the bottom half of humanity to become equal economic participants in the creation of their own local circular WEconomies. Indyweb, with its Individuals owning data in their own Indyhubs, and forming Indypub groups, each dedicated to a specialized aspect of doughnut economics / planetary boundaries parameters can serve as a fabric to knit together a superorganism for rapid whole system change where data is protected and ideas that are made public are openly shared for high efficacy collaboration. Adding MuSIASEM nonlinear nexus analysis is also a critical function to mitigate against progress traps.

Artificial intelligence is currently reshaping our modern era, how do you think artificial intelligence can be utilized to foster the implementation of sustainable development goals at a planetary scale?

Artificial intelligence can be quite useful as a tool that works in conjunction with human intelligence especially when combined with the kind of systems we are developing that, following in the footsteps of Douglas Englebart’s vision of thought augmenting tools, aims to augment human inter intellect in co-solving the complex challenges we now face. However, as pioneering AI, VR and AR researcher Louis Rosenberg warns, Artificial General Intelligence can become dangerous and perhaps humanity’s next greatest progress trap if we do not establish ethics and guidelines for AI research now. It is telling that a 2021 Pew poll found that most professionals feel that from now until 2030, AI will be used mostly for profit and social control. If you look at the unstable regimes threatening the world with their nuclear arsenal, you can see where this is headed. AI, nanomaterials and genetic manipulation allow us to play God, but along with that is the danger each poses when human emotional maturity is still dangerously lacking. This underscores the urgent need to establish a new general science of progress traps, to systematically examine the threats and unintended consequences for new technologies.

It is therefore with great precaution that we use such tools. They are far less powerful than the recurring hype cycles suggest. AI stood for ‘Always imminent’ throughout its over six decades of tumultuous history but can easily be abused. Aside from the obvious applications of being able to search through large data space for solutions, accelerating the time to find such solutions, AI would be useful in modeling the behavior of social-ecological systems and in mitigating unintended consequences of the solutions humans or even other AI recommends. The point where AI will not help us is to explore the space of adjacent problems and unintended consequences, and In order to prevent further unintended consequence that our solutions may generate, AI can be used to explore as many possible realworld impacts as possible. As the network of potential solutions grows, it will require AI under human guidance to handle the huge amounts of data and possible permutations and trajectories. AI can help solve many specific problems, but I think the greatest service is to take all the problems and analyize the macro problem of the best mix of solutions at all scales and dimensions to propose to humans the best possible trajectory to stay under planetary boundaries and avoid tipping points.