After watching "De Impact Formule" at The Green Times

Over the past week, people have begun forwarding a new series of short videos from The Green Times. Here is a bit of reflection.

Our current industrial societies and economies are not sustainable. The toll they impose on the rest of nature is too high. At the same time, widening inequalities between people are becoming increasingly destabilising and increasingly intolerable.

This calls for many more people coming together in organisations that behave as living systems that care: businesses that care for the ecosystems and communities they are part of. 

It is impossible to have a meaningful conversation about this transition while staying within conventional boundaries. Our global systems are deeply interconnected. If we are truly committed to co-creating a regenerative and equitable future, we cannot avoid conversations about imperialism, colonialism, consumerism, capitalism, perpetual economic growth, and individualism.

The "new" economy will not emerge from another collection of hero stories, the kind capitalism has taught us to celebrate, where visionary founders lead us toward a collectively preferred future. Nor will it be the result of incremental improvements. Systems of extraction, exclusion, conflict, and violence sit at the heart of much of what we produce, consume, and applaud. When I drink my morning coffee in the Netherlands, I, too, am part of those systems and (again) an aggressor. 

The transition ahead requires a profound, and for many, uncomfortable, transformation of the institutions surrounding us, like trade rules, national borders, universities, governments, taxation, financial markets, and systems of property ownership.

It asks us to become more collective, more inclusive, and more honest about both the extraordinary achievements of our globally connected material systems and the profoundly unequal distribution of the wealth they have generated. It asks us to become more nature-based and more deeply human.

It means:

• not celebrating entrepreneurial success without acknowledging the decades of publicly funded scientific research that made it possible;
• not reducing financial solidarity with regions whose economies continue to bear the consequences of our shared colonial history;
• not mistaking elite technological spectacle or consumerist cosplay for systemic change;
• not defaulting to a simplified geopolitical worldview rooted in Darwinian competition;
• not investing only in Deep Tech, but investing even more deeply in people, communities, and relationships.

I guess I wish for a more humble deep-tech capital and innovation community across the planet.

The challenge described in the videos will require deep, patient, long-term investment, not only in innovation, but in our communities and in the communities across the world to which we are connected through our material systems. It will require unlearning, embracing discomfort, and navigating uncertainty.

It requires recognising that the stages we design, build, and occupy, and the stories we choose to tell and amplify, create legitimacy. They shape what becomes imaginable, what gains public consent, and ultimately, what future we make possible.

My concern is that presenting this transition as a quick fix, a simple formula, or a neatly separated dual system risks obscuring the scale and complexity of the transformation that is needed.

After watching the videos, I wasn't sure about the path presented and the simplified camps of those who do it right and those who do it wrong - but still genuinely convinced of the good intent. As I have little interest in ideological infighting, I hope we can broaden the conversation.

So, The Green Times, DRIFT, Techleap, InvestNL, Invest International, Future UP, and many others: let's engage further in the uncomfortable conversations this transformation demands. Let's acknowledge the difficult trade-offs, challenge our assumptions, and work together to build an economy that future generations will thank us for, not despite the discomfort, but because we were willing to face it.

Take care!