Add new comment
The New Metaphor
Every aspect of modern business is wasteful. Energy and resources of every kind are left to ferment, thrown away unused. Resources have been in abundance, there was little need to worry about the inefficiencies of the system. We are however entering a period when resources are becoming scarce once more, and the overarching metaphors of our culture are changing.
In times of scarcity, it is not raw power that counts, but efficiency and effectiveness. Burning up all your fuel, squandering all your venture capital, leaping up the corporate ladder at the expense of all else, these will no longer win out over careful, efficient harnessing of resources. Speed is still important, but that speed must be sustained.
All aspects of our society are connected. The need for greater efficiency in resource use applies to every resource: physical, technological, human, everything. In the emerging world, it is the most efficcient who will succeed. Unsustainability and the degradation of the environment (every environment) will cease to be economically viable.
Scarcity as a metaphor is not necessarily a negative view. Scarcity is a value system that respects the individual elements. In many ways the new environment shows far more abundance than the old, but this will come through sharing, through community, not through personal ownership.
It is this contrast in our value systems that marks the seperation of "old" and "new". The old sees scarcity ahead, sees contaction of opportunity. The new sees infinite opportunities, the ability to copy over and over to create forms of wealth never before imagined.
Gentlemen (and gentlewomen), pick your weapons. Pick your metaphor.