Enriching the meta-life vision by large festivals as testing grounds in the global SDG transition
(migrating content, posted on January 10, 2024 )
There is this saying: it takes a village to raise a child. I start to believe it takes a city to raise a transition. Festivals have become pop-up cities and ideal setting ground for transitions, with new tech and recent science. This makes festivals a good case to demo our NEON research project. NEON is about accelerating the energy and mobility transition, creating a forecast for the Nederlands. As a demo, we could project how the NEON research may be applied to a festival. Next to the practical plan of creating a demo, the trend also aligns with the bigger philosophical vision of what modern society is evolving into, particularly how the meta-life vision relates to cities (picture: Lollapalooza Chicago).
Just like everything, festivals are also required to become more sustainable. Smaller festivals have been more able to respond to new legislation to reduce their footprint. Multiple reasons exist why small festivals are able and large festivals are not: some relate to scale effect, others to power dynamics. The same scale and dynamic is seen in society at large blocking the transition to Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). So if we want to enable SDG transition for society at large, we could first enable it for large festivals with the size of a city.
Large festivals have become big and plentiful. In 2023, the 100 biggest festivals were bigger than 200.000 people, the top 3 going over 2 million attendances. Festivals have become pop-up cities. Researchers in the built environment describe how festivals can be testing grounds for circular regions & cities (see Merkx 2023). Such an idea aligns greatly with my practical plan for the last NEON demo and my philosophical vision about global evolution. This article will contain two parts: first the practical plan and next the philosophical vision.
The practical plan relates to a special final demo of the NEON project. In the NEON research project, 35 researchers are working on energy and mobility, exploring how to accelerate the transition for society at large. The project started in 2020 and will end in 2026. The project has 10 work packages (WPs) and 20 public-private partners, looking at the latest R&D development in their domain. The special demo is possible by projecting the NEON WPs to the case of a festival where a unique story arises about a pop-up city. Large festivals recently have some kind of science fair or conference, which also gives the right space to present such a demo. So I’m on a mission to find a large festival as a partner, getting the concrete data to build a concrete model as a showcase.
The philosophical vision is about understanding where humanity and the evolution of this world are heading. In the 1980s-1990s with the rise of personal computers and the internet, two concepts were proposed: Technological Singularity (TS) and Global Brain (GB). I made a short introduction video to TS & GB, combining some good material about both visions. For this introduction, I want to draw attention to the anthropological and applied research I did in the 2000s-2010s, to shift from philosophy to applied science. My research led to a correction to the TS & GB vision, first expressed in a 2011 seminar, but not in a very accessible way. In an attempt to make the vision more accessible, I prefer simpler terminology now by working strongly with metaphors. The presentation is also a decade old, so an update (this article) is long overdue. Allow me to express my TS &GB alternative as the meta-life vision, which is the main topic of the second half of this article.
In urban development, an evolution is seen towards smart cities. In the philosophical vision, such smart cities are not just about data, but about being more sustainable, resilient, and healthy (both physical and mental). It may be more fitting to call them living-cities. The central point in my meta-life vision is to shift the focus from human evolution to urban evolution. While I express cities as meta-cells, the idea originally was expressed by Barbieri (2008) in the opposite direction, seeing how people live in cities like ribosomes live in cells. Barbieri introduced the city metaphor to explain the origin of the first biological cell. I simply recognized the same dynamic is playing to develop the origin of meta-life.
Cities as the meta-cell is a scale correction. The meta-life also requires a curve correction to the Technological Singularity. In evolutionary terms, the process is going very fast, clearly less than say 100 millennia. For human development, this is very slow, but the development has been accelerating, first at a frequency of millennia, next at a frequency of centuries, and more recently at a frequency of decades, so the development process is reaching speed organizations can manage. Our ability to develop pop-up cities is playing directly into this game. So let us first see how NEON research can enrich the vision of pop-up cities and this can enrich the vision of meta-life. In part two of this article.
1. The NEON project applied to festivals
In the past two years, we demonstrated the NEON demo during a trade fair on energy and mobility. This is already quite exceptional, being the only fundamental research project between many innovative companies. While the research is fundamental, the focus on impact and accelerating the transition explains why we stood at a trade fair: some of our tech partners are on it and our social partners (the city of Rotterdam and a province governance N-Braband), come to visit. A trade fair is very business-oriented, while the required SDG is bigger and about the transition of society. So instead of showcasing at a trade fair, we need an alternative. A science fair at a festival does seem to be a great fit.
The demo at a festival would be different from a demo at a trade fair and requires a different narrative. During the trade fair, the story is about how concrete research and tech, are applied to more general governmental challenges. The narrative needs to be reversed: how does a concrete festival become sustainable by general trends in new research and tech? It appears a small difference and yet it is a significant difference. To give such a narrative for NEON, we can have a look at the general structure of the Work Pages (WPs):
WP1-WP3 on energy: creation, transport, and storage
WP4-WP6 on mobility: vehicles, charging, and transport
WP7-WP9 on people: psychology, regulation and social
WP10 on modeling and the integral approach.
The coming subsections will take on details of the general structure. Subsection 1.1 on WP1-WP3 will show an easy fit with the festivals and contribute to the needed innovation for making energy at a festival green. Subsection 1.2 on WP4-WP6 opens a deeper challenge to think big about opportunities and research pop-up cities. Subsection 1.3 on WP7-WP9 creates the relation to transition research and the innovation S-curve, some gap is seen with applied research of earlier WPs. Via an intermezzo (subsection 1.4) on the Next Generation University (NGU) the bridge will be built, elaborating how pop-up cities can become an instrument for transitions. Subsection 1.5 on WP10 ends the practical part by showing how the development of NGU has become applied research in its earliest phase. The practical part of the paper ends by creating a roadmap on how the R&D can continue and it will be an introduction to the philosophical part.
1.1 Next-gen electrifying the festivals (WP1-WP3)
Next-generation wind and sun energy are being explored and have some significantly different characteristics to current solutions. In the NEON project, WP1a is about airborne wind, which comes from a simple understanding of harvesting higher, stronger, and stable winds. Our partner Kitepower is actively approaching the event sector as a niche market. They have been a significant influence on our festival focus. The leading project at the university on sustainable festivals is the GEM-stage, demonstrating an integral approach to creating a sustainable stage. It has a wind turbine able to produce 3KW. Kitepower can produce 30KW now and 100KW soon, for a large festival we probably need ranges of 1–10 MW. Setting up 10–100 kites will not be very likely, but it significantly improves today’s ability. And of course, wind is not the only resource.
Solar energy is considered in WP1b, the new tech is perovskite solar cells. While new solar cells have some improvement it is not in the same range as airborne wind. In this case, I need to explore with WP leader and partners Solarge and Solliance the opportunities for the event sector as a niche market. Today some festivals have solar roofs over their parking lot. This seems a good idea first until we take into account net congestion. When the sun is shining, but the consumption is low, there is excess electricity fed back to the grid that causes congestion. For this reason, in some regions, new solar parks are not getting a permit from the net distributors.
Keeping a classic solar park off the grid and only used for the events would probably be too expensive. Exploring more temporal or mobile solutions could be possible. Other opportunities would be to see the solar park as a testing ground for seasonable storage during non-event times. I would like to learn more about the concrete challenges and solutions the festival organizers currently apply concerning installing solar energy.
Now, let’s consider the new tech. The challenge with current perovskite solar cells is their life span, while they have an opportunity to be 100 % recyclable and can be produced in much lighter material. Considering how festivals need to have a new look every year, we may question if the material could be turned in the festival decoration, to be recycled after the event. This is an example of an unexpected venture.
Moving on to energy distribution and WP2: the research about DC-grids. The partners here are in maritime construction (Damen and RoyalIHC) creating electric (e-) boats. Workboats need a technical grid and some service boats are like floating villages. Now we can see two interesting connections to festivals. On the one hand, shifting from floating villages (boats) to pop-up cities (festivals) and investigating what the improvement of a DC-grid could be. On the other hand, creating a festival-logistic boat. It comes from a weak pattern observed: many of the solutions use shipping containers — for example, kite power, batteries, and even storage for Light Electric Vehicles (LEV, like steps). Take into account how the container industry grew because of cities, so maybe a festival-logistic e-boat could be effective for the logistics of a pop-up city. The boat itself may function as a huge battery during the festival.
This brings me to WP3 and storage. In this case, I have already approached our battery partner Elestor. Elestor can produce weekly storage and the festival seems ideal for such a solution. The festival seems ideal for weekly storage: charging during the week when the festival is set up and using it during the weekend of the festival. The CEO Guido Dalessi explained how their solution, using Barium in a flow battery, responds badly to transportation. He helped me to find battery alternatives. This illustrates how partners are helping out to get to a more sustainable solution even if it doesn’t create business for them. I do need to talk with Guido again to see if a permanent implementation could assist with the problems on the permanent solar park: i.e. avoid congestion by seasonable storage. Maybe festivals will be the ideal testing grounds for such an approach. At the same time, I looking for other battery partners. Just as with multiple sources of producers, we may need multiple types of batteries.
The WPs on energy have the most direct relation to the festival and already show a lot of unexpected relations and the need for a lot of venturing. Can we resolve safety concerns for the airborne wind? How can solar and hydrogen develop pop-up abilities or seasonable storage? Would the DC grid have a significant impact? Is a festival-logistic e-boat feasible? All are still research questions and even if the research rejects the solution, it still creates a lot of new experiences and spillover effects. As we move to the other three general sections, we will shift more and more from the practical plan to the philosophical vision. The technical implications will be clear in the next subsection.
1.2 Thinking big with pop-up cities (WP4-WP6)
The next three WPs relate to mobility: new vehicle designs (WP4), Medium-Voltage (MV) charging (WP5), Mobility as a Service (WP6a), and the safety shell (WP6b). When considering the national scale such a focus is relevant, projecting this to a festival creates at least one effect: to think bigger. The solution currently being built, at the scale of a city, can become an inspiration to improve the organization of large festivals. In WP4, we see a big gap between Technology Readiness Levels (TRL). The TRL levels range from 0 (basic research) to 9 (operations). The vehicle design is at the system/subsystem level (TRL8). So hardly any research left. On the other hand, new research tools around calculating important ecosystem dynamics like resilience may become very relevant to pop-up cities, first studies are being explored (TRL0). So some exploration is done in the outlines. In this article I will only focus on the TRL8, explaining the TRL0 would be an article in itself.
WP4 researches electrical (e-) powertrains. In a motor vehicle, the powertrain comprises the main components that generate power. Creating a modular e-powertrain simulation platform allows exploring a range of applications from lightweight (LEVs, like steps) to heavy transportation systems (e-trucks, e-buses, e-boats, and even e-plains). This is very relevant to the EV market. The relevance for the event market is limited to LEV and vehicle-to-grid (V2G). The V2G is to use the vehicle batteries as a distributed storage unit during the time the vehicle stays parked. Some festivals have solar parking lots, allowing cars to charge during the day, during the night they can be discharged. This is possible now, so what would new research and tech add?
The V2G becomes more interesting with heavy transportation and the relation to Medium-Voltage (MV) used in both WP2 and WP5. Using an MV grid would fit the WP2. In WP5 MV charing considers heavy transportation (e-trucks, e-buses even e-boats). During docking the vehicles need to get charged quickly. Normally in logistics docking should be as short as possible. With EV and V2G docking can become an innovative service relating to balancing the grid. To create an extreme example, consider for a moment a festival-logistic e-boat would be possible, the boat would stay docked before and after the festivals. Wind and sun energy production would be the first to be deployed and the last to get packed. So plenty of time to recharge. I give this boat as an example because e-trucks and e-buses will probably have the same limitations as e-cars. They need to be drivable right after the festivals. Car, e-trucks, and e-buses can still be used with V2G by using clever business plans, e.g. stimulating the departure only after recharging, so the batteries can be used fully during the night.
The V2G needs business plans to create some kind of crowd control. WP6 is also about crowd control. For big festivals, people travel all over the world and some festivals give a service, including the festival experience during transit. Could the research on Mobility as a Service (MaaS) in WP6a help to make festival transit sustainable? Another part of WP6a relates to city logistics and the development of micro-hubs, so larger transportation stays outside the city center. Looking at the full logistic picture of a large festival would have some interesting large-scale opportunities.
Crowd control also relates to WP6b research: the safety shell. The research is about using smart software for self-driving vehicles. For example, detect when a pedestal produces an unexpected crossing and the vehicle needs to respond to avoid an accident. In a festival, another kind of safety related to crowd control of the mass of people, which also requires recognition software. Most probably the research in WP6b would be too specific to get applied in this way. This will be the case with most NEON research. Yet the PhD students have another important network benefit. They have a much richer view of all related research and would be able to quickly and effectively pull in the right researchers.
What WP4-WP6 makes us consider is to use of large-scale solutions to set up infrastructure for large festivals. It will work even better if the festivals become bigger. Would we want festivals to become even bigger? Considering how quickly a festival is sold out, we wonder if the demand for the festival is bigger. Developing infrastructure for large events is relevant to more than just festivals. The concept of a pop-up city for the event sector is more general, festivals are just a clear demonstration. More generally the concept of pop-up city is an opportunity for rental business and not even limited to the event sector. Considering how climate crises ask for disaster relief abilities and how such events require aid to large groups of people.
1.3 The social tipping point paradox (WP7-WP9)
Cities are not just the infrastructure, for a festival to become a full testing ground for urban development, we will need to consider the human side. The general trend is to provide ownership. This is similar in a city, in effective cities, the inhabitants feel ownership. The ownership can be researched from different domains. In NEON we look at psychology (WP7), regulation & standards (WP8a&b), and sociology (WP9). The psychology in WP7 is about the acceptance of new products and services around the transition (i.e. airborne wind solutions and solar energy projects in municipalities). Research on law concerns energy justice (EU law) and the standardization investigates the new technology in NEON. Each solution has its challenges to improve social acceptance. As a general trend, we noticed how the human side of research improves cooperation by inducing positive social tipping points.
The social tipping points can also be negative and earlier research even showed a social tipping points paradox. In 2005 the market for tools to build interactive websites was booming and many open source communities existed. This allowed observation and research of effective R&D cooperation in communities. I became involved in several communities and quickly focused on one with a peculiar rich culture. The focus did not disappoint, as exponential growth was observed in the next years together with very effective cooperation. By 2010 a tipping point was recognized and I interviewed most of the leading startup founders in the community (read their stories), both the outcome and what happened next were surprising.
In theory, it was expected to be a positive tipping point, in practice it turned out a paradox: while an acceleration of market value was observed, the ability to continue effective R&D cooperation broke. To understand we need to see the force behind effective R&D cooperation, not by open innovation policy, but by an unexpected force of self-organization (see Kiemen 2011). The specific tipping point is known as a transition from an incubation phase (with early adopters) to a growth phase (of the early majority), which are two phases in the innovation S-curve. The tipping point requires a culture shift, see the book Crossing the Chasm. During the interviews, it was the only book all the founders referred to.
The outcome of the interviews was a bit unexpected, there was no explicit policy (i.e. open innovation). Instead, innovation was the effect of self-organization (see Kiemen 2011), creating an innovation commons. The commons are the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of society. What happened after 2010 was an exodus of the many innovative people, while the demand for innovation grew significantly, creating a tragedy of the innovation commons. To the great surprise of all, even the most R&D-minded startup left by 2012 (see story Development Seed). This is also the year my research ended as the open knowledge sharing in the community stopped. In the next years, the research became theoretical, by designing transition methods to overcome the social tipping paradox, the method relates strongly to the research on WP9. This does require a lot of explanation so I will express it in a separate subsection.
1.4 Next Generation University (NGU)
The social tipping paradox shows how the tipping point from incubation to growth blocks the ability to reach the next tipping point (between growth and maturity). The observation and limited experiments led to a theoretical method, designed to overcome the paradox (details in chapter 8). A lot of details about the specific method are not relevant to the current article, so allow me to keep referring to it as the NGU method. The scale made clear this method is at a whole new level. Consequently, only aspects have been validated (details in chapters 9 and 10). Based on this validation the final PhD chapter describes the Next Generation University (NGU). The NGU method shows how the pyramid is popping up (see figure).
In the pyramid, the middle and base layers relate to a university’s 1st pillar (education) and 2nd pillar (research). The 3rd pillar (valorization) is the NGU method. The top layer is a novelty, expected for the 4th generation university, and exists to resolve grand challenges. For details about the NGU method, we can give a recap of an earlier article on TU2GU: from Technical Universities (TU) to Grand Universities (GU). The article explains how NGU is a social evolution. The evolution is ancient and has been accelerating. The first 1st generation took millennia of development, the 2nd generation took centuries of development and the 3rd took decades of development, so we could expect the NGU i(.e. 4th generation) to develop in years.
The 1st generation is ancient scholarly institutes of wisdom going back to before the Common Era (BCE). In the 1st generation, we see scholars using reason and writing to develop the social sciences (i.e. the great philosophers). Our classic universities are 2nd generation, adding scientists who build instruments and laboratories to develop models of the natural sciences. For some time indication, Galileo Galilei is often seen as one of the pioneers in 1586–1642.
The 3rd generation splits natural sciences into the exact sciences and applied sciences, creating TUs. The first TU was founded in Paris in 1794 and many would follow in the next decades. A TU also has a 3rd pillar on valorization, entrepreneurs and investors join universities to develop ventures.
It is not certain the 4th generation will follow the accelerating trend and earlier events show the opposite. In the TU2GU article, I argue society demanded NGU transformation in 1968 and our leadership failed to understand, creating a conservative response and knocking down the public request. This fight between the public and conservative power keeps on popping up, like the Arabic Spring revolt in 2010 and its will for democracy. Yet the international community hardly helped and the same knocking down happened when the event spread to Occupy Wall Street in 2011. The effect led to a scary outcome: 2023 became a year of global conflict not seen in decades. What leadership does not understand is how evolution cannot be stopped, humanity can decide to stop playing (i.e. get distinct or become a conservative species like reptiles).
The NGU is an evolutionary force and needs to be seen in the big picture. We should not blame leadership too easily, the evolutionary force is demanding a lot. This is clear when we go back to the middle of the 20th century when leadership was on top of the curve. For example, big political ambitions, like the Manhattan Project (atomic bomb) in the 1940s, and the Apollo missions (to the moon), in the 1960s. Such projects took up 2% of a country’s GDP. Today, forced by climate change, we do see how all GDP needs to transfer. The scale, speed, and impact of innovation led to the meta-crisis. The meta-crisis is the underlying crisis driving a multitude of crises. The absence of conscious leadership is a serious existential threat, creating a zombification process, just think about social-media addiction.
The evolutionary force is still pushing to build the NGU 4th pillar, with or without conscious leadership. The effect is seen as micro-management in a community, with self-organization innovation on the top (see Kiemen 2011). For the technology valorization community of universities, the process is described as the Triple Helix Model of public-private partnerships. The model has been extended in theory to a quadruple model (2009), adding the public interest. So even from this practical angle the NGU evolution is pushing to the same converging point.
The shift from 3rd gen. valorizing to 4th gen. valorization is to manage a transition. Going back to the above picture, this is shown as the base R&D layer adding infrastructure during the maturity phase. With a 4th gen. University, also a new pillar is expected, and an extra agent. So a short recap of the agent with each generation: 1st the educators, 2nd the researchers, 3rd the entrepreneurs, and now 4th the policymakers (government in the above picture). The 4th pillar will first guide the pop-up of the pyramid and settle the policymakers as the top layer. All this is already implicity present, the 4th pillar is simply about making the process more effective.
Another way to express the 4th pillar is given by WP9 as the X-curve of transition. The X-curve is two opposite S-curves: the innovation S-curve and a degrowth S-curve (to dismantle the existing system). The X-curve method and the pyramid of NGU can be seen as two projections of a 3D picture. The X-curve (left figure below) is the top view and the NGU pyramid (right figure) is the front view. The details in the right figure should be more relevant to the current article. To help visualize the 3D picture, consider how the orange spiky circle, in the X-curve, would be the middle layer of the pyramid. The white center circle would be the top layer of the pyramid. The arrows in the X-curve relate to the four transition phases shown in the previous picture.
After the publication of the PhD (2015) the research on the NGU method stayed dormant until the NEON project came along (2020). NEON is seen as applied research on the premature phase and using Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) we can build up a roadmap of how NGU is expected to go through the different transition phases. NEON is creating the required foundation. In follow-up projects, all WPs should synchronize more and more, although not at the same TRL. The higher the TRL, the more it drives the momentum of the development. I expect WP1–3 can become a unique venture for large-scale rental of green energy hub (TRL5). The thinking-big part (WP4–6) would be validated in the lab (TRL4), showing how the energy hub scales up to the logistics of a pop-up city. The human side (WP7–9) needs a stronger focus on the tipping point paradox and developing a proof-of-concept (TRL3). Most of WP10 can join the venture, while other topics in WP10 relate closer to the basic principle (TRL1), like the NGU method.
The first follow-up project would start with the above TRL levels and by the end of the project, they all go up one level. The project would focus on getting practical with the venture and researching how to scale it up. In the outlines, the concept of NGU infrastructure (TRL2) is developing. The NEON project is still running for 2 years and a follow-up project would also require 6 years, only after this time, can the shift to the growth phase occur. In the growth phase, we would finally reach the NGU 3rd layer. This is only possible if the think-big finds a market to demonstrate (TRL5), creates a lab to validate the human side (TRL4), and becomes a proof-of-concept for NGU (TRL3).
Just as getting from TRL1 to TRL3 takes a decade, we can expect another decade is needed to get NGU to TRL5. So in optimal conditions, when the follow-up project shows continuous development and does not become dormant (like between 2015–2020), we need two decades just for a proof of concept. If the concept is proven, we may see yet another project relating to the maturity phase and use the method for other grand challenges. The philosophical section will go into more detail about weak signals that existed, like how a project was formulated in 2012 to avoid the pandemic. At this moment people are only waking up to the scale and challenge humanity is facing expressing different grand challenges and recognizing the meta-crisis. Before going to see what is next with the philosophical section, I first need to finish the practical section. The last section explains how WP10 is driving the NGU applied research in a premature phase.
1.5 The premature phase of NGU (WP10)
A premature phase exists of loosely related parts not having any momentum collectively, but the individual parts can have momentum, as is the case with NEON. Development in the premature phase is normally driven by evolution. Fundamental transition research and insight into design tools allow this phase to become part of transition management. An earlier article explains in more detail, how it works. The focus of WP10 is Agent-Based Modeling (ABM), lifting those abilities to a new level. By ABM, complex interactions can run in a virtual simulation, also called digital twins. The digital twins relate to the maturity phase, so we see how two phases are added simultaneously. A short recap of the earlier article can help clarify why.
For each phase different user-experience is created before the R&D. The first users are the innovators and they have a direct user-experience. For all following successive groups a trick will be required to gain user-experience before R&D. The first actual customers are the adopters. To get feedback from adopters before building a prototype, a game can be played as-if the prototype was built, which is called pretotyping. Pretotyping can reduce the gap between the premature and incubation phases through customer-experience, strongly improving the relevance of any product. The next group of customers is the early majority and they require a market. Again a design trick allows one to gain experience beforehand. This trick has been applied by big tech companies, to have employees play as-if they are the market, this method is called dogfooding. Dogfooding can reduce the gap between the incubation and growth phases through employee-experience, already building market capabilities before the market exists. A company like Microsoft has demonstrated the value of dogfooding and it has been a common method in the industry ever since.
There is a reason why successive groups exist and it relates to the gap between the groups. The gap is the effect of the psychology of each group. Adopters don’t mind working with a product that has many limitations. For example, the first EV had hardly any charging points even today the lack of enough charging points is holding back the market. This brings us to the gap between the early and late majority where now policymakers require civilian-experience to make sure infrastructure exists by the time the market has matured. The game of building infrastructure has always been a slow process, indeed building roads goes back to a Roman empire. With a need to accelerate the transition, a need for civilian-experience grows. With civilian-experience, the co-development of infrastructure can ensure society is ready when the market matures.
Civilian-experience can be reached by producing good digital twins. It is complicated, as a lot of human side researchers need to get involved to make the simulation produce an accurate civilian-experience. Zenmo, the partner of WP10, shows how ABM can be used for niches, like business premises, in particular for industrial areas with congestion problems. Today the ABM is a service provided for a transition of municipalities and business premises. Similarly, customer-experience is used to find investors for product development and employee-experience is used to find investors for market development. Finding investors is part of the 3rd pillar of validation, the policymaker as a new member of the academic community gives more insight into the 4th pillar.
From the current niches (municipalities and business premises) the development can grow to help larger region development. Zenmo is not the only company, a market for digital twins is emerging, it is interesting to see how the market is creating its infrastructure, this is recognized as the TRL level of the human side (WP7–9) is co-evolving with the market for digital twins. I believe this is one of the strong contributions made by NEON, showing how social sciences become stronger engineering sciences. Considering the earlier road map showing how different TRL levels are expected and develop the NGU over the next decades also shows how the development is high-tech.
High-tech is in a maturity phase, it has been developing for about a century now and has reached global ambitions, the spillover effect to regional development has become interesting. This region’s development has a frequency of decades and the effect is seen over a century. For example, Philips was founded in Eindhoven in 1891 and a century ago the high-tech R&D has changed the region and the culture in the region producing the current ambition of a Brainport region. Articulating such ambition shows a change in the game, now region development is not the spillover effect but the focus. Other large-scale development, like a Seaport, has a similar regional effect. Seaports have developed over centuries, but with Brainport they can undergo big transformations. Many different “other-ports” are seen, as I explain in subscription two of the philosophical vision. First, we need a step back to the introduction.
2. Enriching the meta-life vision
The introduction explains how the meta-life vision suggests a correction to the Global Brain (GB) vision and the Technological Singularity (TS) vision. The GB correction is about scale: humans as ribosomes and cities as cells. The TS correction is about the curve. A singularity is the effect of an exponential curve going to infinity. The correction is to consider the curve not going to infinity, but becoming an innovation S-curve. This S-curve has been exponential for the past 10.000 years. I expect the curve to become linear to resolve the tipping point paradox (i.e. more sustainability and regenerative designs at scale). The suggestion makes a claim easy to verify and is counter-intuitive. Why would innovation slow down as we reach the midpoint?
Understanding a slow-down effect requires insight into elementary physics and wave-particle properties, like the photoelectric effect: it is possible to free an electron out of a metal, by using a light beam with the right frequency. If the frequency is too slow or too fast it will not work. In the same way, a too-slow evolution will not trigger any momentum, so the development can stick in the premature phase indefinitely. A too-fast evolution will not allow absorption and create a scattering effect. This was an assumption in 2011 and was verified by 2021, particularly by the COVID crisis. Some new ways of working got adopters very fast during the lockdown to see a return to business-as-usual once the lockdown measurements were lifted. Some scattered effects linger, but a full adoption was not reached.
To make it very visual, consider the Clubhouse app. It had a very steep growth with 10 million users in February 2021 (see monthly install graph below). It was gone as quickly as it came and only those being part of the event now know of the experience. The experience was impressive and gave me a much deeper understanding of the Global Brain, with some relation to the hive-mind experience. Just like the hive-mind experience, it was too unique event and no momentum was triggered. So the past decade, the slow-down effect of the upper limit has become less controversial and better understood.
The slow-down is however an illusion and the effect of relativity: innovation appears to become linear on a personal level allowing absorption, but the acceleration is still seen at the meta-level by developing SDG. This is why we must shift focus from human evolution to meta-life evolution (at the scale of cities). So the TS vision turns into an S-curve vision and, instead of a singularity, a nearing midpoint is expected. The singularity is expected in 2040–2050(according to Kurzweil). This is also close to the cap of 10 billion people in 2058 (estimated by the UN). We could see the midpoint in the 2050s, give or take a few more decades depending on the slowdown effect. A better calculation of the slow-down effect is required for an improved estimation. In the grand scheme, this does not matter so much: we have another 10.000 years for the full S-curve to deploy. Can we explore what that implies?
More metaphors from evolution will help us to look deeper into the future. The first subsection is focused on the already noticed mind effects of the meta-life, with experiences like the
hive-mind (during a keynote on the 7th of May 2011, in Chicago) and the global-mind (by Clubhouse app in February-April 2021). So far this development had a frequency of decades, it is expected to gain momentum and with it a frequency of years, to be resolved in a few decades (i.e. 2050s). The driving force of AI, NGU education, and the grand challenges are behind this expected momentum. The full NGU evolution is going slower. The other NGU pillars: research (2nd), valorization (3rd), and transition (4th) relate to the second subsection. It shows how NGU becomes the nucleus of a living city. The subsection considers the development of high-tech regions turning into Brainports and some weak signals indicating this can help other regions turn into other-ports. The development has a frequency of decades and will be resolved in a few centuries.
We expect the S-curve to be more or less linear during this NGU deployment, what comes next can explain the decline of innovation i.e. last phase of the S-curve. For this last phase, more metaphors with biological evolution are made, showing embryogenesis at the meta-level. Simply put, with living-cities being the metaphorical meta-cells, nations become like meta-organs, creating a global-body. This metaphor should not be taken too literally. The evolutionary force at play will simply stimulate specialization and cooperation (i.e. other-ports). The development has only a frequency of centuries and resolves in 10 millennia (based on the S-curve shape). Some fascinating insights are emerging today that can look deep into the future. Compare it to how people 10.000 years ago would respond to seeing metal melt in a fire. Of course, they could not grasp how this was the weak signal of an industrial revolution, but they may have felt the significant importance of the experience.
2.1 The meta-system transition of consciousness
Current NGU events, on the next generation education, are creating a new vision of a university as an open-ended learning hub for a city focused on solving grand challenges. With each NGU transition, the number of students increased by a factor of 10. In the classics universities (2nd generation) the rooms had 30ish students. In the 3rd generation, we see rooms with 300ish students. In the 4th generation, digital technology makes it possible to scale up significantly.
So what becomes possible with 3000 people in a room? This brings me to the hive-mind experience (see full article). The hive-mind experience in 2011 was a pragmatic solution to a concrete problem: how to have a Q&A after the keynote with an audience of 3000 people? The experience happened with a tech audience, by applying a tech solution.
Little did the organizers know they implemented a meta-brain. The 3000 people looking at the same keynote (right-brain) and sharing their thoughts via social media (left-brain). It requires great effort to synchronize both left- and right- meta-brain activity during the event, so the experience only happened quite late in the keynote and only lasted very shortly. Once synchronization was reached, a feeling arose both beautiful and scary, which I call the hive-mind experience: a feeling that your consciousness was not limited to your body, but present in the whole room. The experience can be understood as the direct experience of consciousness. The NGU education is different from a keynote and other higher-education innovations need to be considered like challenge-based education, life-long learning, flipped classrooms, etc. I’m emphasizing the hive-mind as it is missing in the literature on innovation in education.
Fast forward to 2021 and the global-mind experience with the Clubhouse app. Now 10 million people are exploring a new media tool. The tool was a bit like talk radio on steroids. The 10 million people is the expected upper limit and final target for a living city. So the global-mind experience (by Clubhouse) is a window on what the hive-mind of a living city can become. The experience shows us a deeper meaning of what the meta-system transition of consciousness could be. In February 2021 people had no clue what the new app allows. It took weeks before relevant synchronization was reached and it required great artists, philosophers, and entrepreneurs in large numbers. What was created can be best expressed as a kind of improvisation theater experience. Being part of some of these experiences, I can report the uniqueness. Emotions would get expressed clearly and logically, at the same time, it felt like being an oracle, as if a deeper unconsciousness suddenly gained agency.
The global-mind gave a feeling of belonging and assimilation produced by collective ritual action. Later on, I would come to understand this experience as Collective Effervescence. Effervescence is an uncommon word, describing the chemical process of forming bubbles in a liquid. Psychological, effervescence has an interesting relation to flow. In psychology, flow is the ability to balance skills and challenges, explaining different emotional experiences of consciousness. The psychology of collective effervescence creates the experience of shared purpose. In my previous article about the mesa-model (i.e. inward model) of creation, I elaborate on how we can learn from collective effervescence to develop an understanding of the personal state of psychological effervescence. As a state, I see it as the balance between flow and creation that embodies the purpose of knowledge (internal) or artifacts (external). Early religions created altars and totems as such artifacts, while science created knowledge. This duality between science and religion is dissolving with non-dual thinking. Resolving the duality requires a higher level of abstraction (similar to special relativity and general relativity).
A higher level of abstraction can be challenging, luckily we can approach the concept relatively well with metaphors. For example, I express the state of psychological effervescence as the balance between flow and creation. Notice it is creating acceleration: where flow (i.e. motion) produces transition, effervescence (i.e. acceleration) produces transformation. At this moment the relation has little relevance, by the end of this article the importance of effervescence as acceleration will become stronger.
Creating an induced state of effervescence is possible by psychedelic drugs. Compare psychedelic drugs metaphorically to flying as a passenger with an aircraft, you gain some idea of what flying feels like but have no idea about the physical laws behind the experience. We need to question what psychedelic drugs have in common with the origin of religion and the experience of the hive-mind and the global-mind. I do have one other experience in February 2017, best expressed as a cosmic-mind. I was under extreme psychological pressure, trying, in my mind, to save the world, like avoiding a pandemic and other grand challenges by advocating for collective intelligence. Some small successes, like helping companies to connect with the collective unconsciousness would result in being in a non-stop state of delirium for weeks. Most probably my body produced DMT, the question is why did my work trigger such a psychochemical response?
During my spiritual sabbatical, during the rest of 2017, I learned everything I could about plant spirits and other induced states of spiritual experience (meditation, mantras, etc). All experiences were light versions of my initial cosmic-mind experience. I still believe the initial experience was a memory of cosmic creation and a glimpse into what the global-mind can become, beyond human rationality: the assimilation into a celestial being. During the spiritual sabbatical, I did miss the relation to digital transformation, like AI and art, to take on symptoms of anxiety. The hive-mind and global-mind had no relation to any spiritual practice, yet they create psychological transformation i.e. technology can also tell us something about effervescence.
Other rare cases showing how technology produces psychological transformation have been mentioned in section 2.1.2 of my PhD. In my PhD I follow all these technology mediation and cognition to build platforms for collective intelligence and the ultimate platform is the Next Generation University (NGU). With the focus on technology mediation, I describe the NGU as the Interversity i.e. NGU driven by the development of the internet. An earlier article expresses the three phases of meta-system transition as three generations of Interversity, each having a different output: cultivating commons, guiding transitions, and guiding transformations. With a short recap on generations of Interversity, I will finish this subsection.
The 1st generation Inteversity is simply a continuation of the converging evolution between NGU education (not driven by tech) and the hive-mind / global-mind experience (driven by tech). The converging evolution is driven by a need to overcome the tipping-point paradox (see section 1.3). The expected effect is a meta-un-consciousness cultivating the innovation commons. Each Inteversity generation the relation between hive-mind / global-mind becomes stronger, creating a meta-consciousness. The 2nd generation asks for a proactive attitude to guide the transition by the NGU pyramid method (see section 1.3). In the pyramid, the second layer is about NGU education as a hive-mind guiding the transition. It gives us some idea of how psychological flow would exist in the meta-consciousness. With the 2nd generation Inteversity, we expect to have the hive-mind / global-mind experience integrated. The 3rd generation is still elusive, relating to the weak signals on effervescence and cosmic-mind, a lot more experiments will be needed to grasp the potential. Some preliminary ideas are shared in the last subsection of this article.
2.2 NGU as the nucleus of a living city
In the case of NGU, we notice how education (i.e. 1st pillar) has momentum with conferences. The other pillars have events, but no momentum yet (i.e. premature phase and not yet incubation phase). NEON research is seen as one of many pioneering projects on the 2nd pillar (i.e. research). We can also see pioneering projects on the 3rd pillar (i.e. valorization), with the innovation literature writing more about grand challenges and innovative ecosystems. In the field, weak signals allow us to make an educated guess about the emerging 4th pillar (i.e. transition). Metaphorically NGU becomes a nucleus for the living-city, allowing a region to develop. The metaphor relates to development seen in the field, in particular the development of large-scale ambitions like Brainport. The Brainport is about region development, the size of a province with a capital city having a university (metaphorically the nucleus).
The concept of Brainport originates from Brainport Eindhoven in the province N-Brabant where Eindhoven has a Technical University (TU/e) as a central player collaborating with the other innovation institutes, as seen with the Eindhoven Engine. One of Brainport’s ambitions is to create the TU/e scale jump.TU/e has indicated its willingness to grow to a doubling of its master’s graduation rate for the talent requirement in Brainport. The amount of money required for such an ambition creates challenges at the national level. Often it is hard to create a radical unequal amount of governance support to just one university. Yet for a scale-jump, this would be required. The scale jump is very unlikely to happen with the ongoing political climate of Nederlands (and Europe in general).
We need to understand how evolution does not care about politics and in the absence of the needed leadership, we have collateral damage. The pandemic could have been avoided and the same for all big problems, but the needed leadership led to evolution taking a more radical, and non-human, path. The pandemic accelerated the digital transition and the war in Ukraine accelerated the green energy transition. The evolutionary force will not slow down and pressure will keep on building to produce the origin of meta-life, with or without humanity and its humane values (like democracy). This brings me to a worrying question: is humanity the catalyst or the fuel of the S-curve?
As a catalyst humanity will keep on existing, as a fuel we become extinct. The irony it is up to our leadership to get ahead of the curve. Evolution is simple, if we don’t use it we lose it. Cave-dwelling animals lose their sight. I guess that leaderless humanity, driving a meta-system transition, will lose leadership to AI. For example, avoiding the pandemic would have been more human, cheaper, and easier. An actual solution was the topic in the outlines of a trading mission to Hebei province in 2012, allow me to elaborate on the trading mission first and next come back to how we are losing the leadership to AI.
The mission was about professionalizing higher education. In the outline of the mission our project leader wanted to test an idea, and it created quite a disturbance. The metaphor of the project leader was to compare all solutions at the mission like parts of a car and he questions if it would make more sense to sell an integral solution: The Food Metropol. The Food Metropol, which I now would call Foodport, would be the size of a small city connecting all food innovations and able to improve food security for a larger city (in the case of Hebei province this would be for Beijing). Compare it metaphorically like a breakwater against a tsunami, now creating a Foodport to avoid a pandemic. The fact we had a pandemic originating in the province of Hebei is a bitter confirmation of our assumptions. Today being a bit involved in the Brainport ambition it is clear how incredibly complex the challenge of a Foodport would be and how AI comes into the picture.
The trading mission was organized by the University of Wageningen i.e. another province with another capital city, with the university having a different specialization. In other words, the Foodport co-evolves with Brainport. Metaphorically, we can see this co-evolution as embryogenesis at the level of meta-cells (i.e. living-cities), each transforming into other-ports. The Foodport would be like a liver cell, while the Brainport is like a neural cell. So the slow meta-embryogenesis is seen, which will be the topic of the next subsection. To wrap up, the reaction to leadership and AI needs to be expressed.
Today, AI tools are being built where we have no clue how the tool is gaining intelligence i.e. we are externalizing the awareness. This is a strong contrast to the hive-mind, global-mind experience where we are extending awareness. The main question here, is what is the interface, and for whom is this interface? Today the interfaces are built for our systems and not for humans. For example with social media platforms, humans have become the product: trying to keep a person on the platform as long as possible. This is already creating psychological health problems. Metaphorically it is like the development of combustion engines, where we did not know the effect it would have on climate change. Today, some notice the meta-crisis with its dangers at a scale and effect never seen before. In my view, the meta-crisis is going to trigger meta-consciousness, with or without humans (i.e. catalyst or fuel).
2.3 Global development, the embryonic process of a celestial species
To take an even bigger perspective and see development at a frequency of centuries to be resolved in millennia, we should try to understand the meta-level embryogenesis process: what is this earth trying to give birth to? I will reason it is giving birth to celestial species and I mean it both literally and poetically. Literally: the species will have the solar system as its playground. Poetically: species will be the embodiment of Gods. This claim seems far-fetched so let me start slow and build up a way to reason about such a far future from now, showing how weak signals do allow us to make educated guesses or at least gain a new reference frame that allows new explorations. Just like the hive-mind / global-mind created a new reference frame for cognitive research. So where do we look to find the weak signals about the meta-level embryogenesis?
Let us start with numbers. A human cell has 10 million ribosomes, so the size of our large cities. The vision of the city as a meta-cell, with people like ribosomes, has the same scale. So it is not far-fetched today. At this moment 34 cities worldwide have such a size. Not so many people it seems, with 8 billion in the world, we do see migration to the cities, so more people will move to larger cities. If all the expected 10 billion people would live in such cities we have 1000 meta-cells. It sounds a lot, until we compare it to a human body having 36 trillion cells, even a fruitfly has 580.000 cells. To simplify, we could say it is a factor of 1000 to 10.000 smaller at this moment. Can the world ever become so crowded (and do we want this)? Let us reverse the question, when had the world 10.000 to 1000 times fewer people? Estimations give us a world population of about 1 million in 10.000 BCE and 10 million by 6500 BCE. This does go back to the time we estimate the origin of the S-curve (about 10 millennia ago). Being close to the middle, we could scale up to trillions of meta-cells by the end of the S-curve.
Humanity is expected to top off at 10 billion this century, all data are clear about this, so the idea of trillions of living-cities appears counterfactual if we only focus on the number of people. We have just reached the dawn of artificial intelligence, so we may need to find growth by looking at non-human cognitive agency. An extrapolation tells us about a general trend, independent of the actual details, like will humans be the catalyst of fuel? Other extrapolations are possible, relating to the dominant force at the different scales (cellular, human, and meta-life). At the cellular level electromagnetism is the dominant force. At the human level gravity is the dominant force and it appears meta-life opens a window to a currently elusive force we know at the larger scales of the cosmos: dark energy. Allow me to reason about the three scales and their forces in more detail.
At the cellular level electromagnetism is the dominant force. Gravity is even too weak for most small animals, like insects and even some mammals. In principle, squirrels can survive a fall of any height, and a case exists of a cat falling from a 19-storey window. Simply put: any animal below 1kg has little to fear of gravity, even animals below 10kg with a proper body build. Birds are the biggest exception some species weigh 20kg and fly. Humans don’t have the body build and by the time we are one year old, we already got into the 10kg weight. To us, gravity is the dominant force. As a thought experiment, I question how gravity and consciousness relate. At first, no evident relation seems to exist, but thinking profoundly on the topic it seems the relation is not trivial. First, intelligence/consciousness is the only force to overcome the gravitationally pull completely, by building spacecraft. Second, no intelligence/consciousness is ever detected in outer space, we are looking at celestial bodies (planets and moons) to find life.
Consider how by default, electromagnetism is bipolar, while gravity is monopolar, but in labs, we can make a magnetic monopole. In a wicked way, spacecraft become the polar side of gravity made by intelligence/consciousness. So how strongly are gravity and consciousness connected? At this moment the questions seem silly and naive. I guess when humans first saw molten metal their questions were also silly and naive, but they did touch on an important weak signal. With the concept of effervescence, the idea of consciousness having a relation to gravity is only becoming stronger. Just like electricity and magnetism have such a dual relation it seems gravity and effervescence have a dual relation. Gravity is a weak pull force bringing all together, while effervescence is a weak creation force pulling it all apart. I wonder how deep effervescence goes: is the world self-actualizing and dreaming itself into existence?
Earlier I mentioned how flow produces transition (i.e. motion) and effervescence produces transformation. Transition by flow can be seen as motion, while transformation by effervescence can be seen as acceleration. Gravity is indistinguishable from acceleration, also expressed as curvatures in space-time. We need a lot of mass to reach interesting gravity. For example, it is estimated about half of Earth’s gravity, or about 4G would be needed to have an atmosphere. Is it a coincidence this is roughly the same mass required for the smallest back hole? We will find more weak links between black holes and life. Like the Planck units for mass. Planck units are absolute units in the universe and the unit for mass is about the weight of a fruitfly egg. Too many weak signals make a coincidental relation improbable and we should investigate the relation profoundly.
Allow me another way to approach the weak force, by considering how animals can see electromagnetism (i.e. light) and feel gravity. I’ll argue how meta-life sees gravity and feels an elusive force, we only recently came to recognize as dark energy. Thanks to human ingenuity we recently started to see gravity through a gravitational wave detector. This can be seen metaphorically as a gravitational-eye and this eye allows us to see deep into space where black holes are merging. It is also at this scale we find dark energy. First expressed as dark matter in the 1930s, by observing the spin of galaxies and integrated as dark energy in 1998 (see Wikipedia). Dark energy is a force interacting with gravity, and not with electromagnetism i.e. belonging to a meta-level.
Could the gravitational-eye play a role in the meta-embryogenesis of Gaia? The gravitational-eye may be the first of many sensory-ports of the celestial body. The current detectors are big buildings, not yet at the scale of other-ports and no evolutionary pressure except human curiosity is driving this development, so it may take centuries before any actual momentum is given to sensory-ports. We do notice other-ports with a non-earthly focus. The company SpaceX is building a spaceport in Texas as a gateway to Mars. Elon Musk tweeted “Creating the city of Starbase, Texas” indicating that the spaceport would be at the size we see for other-ports. The current momentum did allow the development of a large factory to develop the rockets that can open our abilities to colonize our solar system. In the next decades, we will see if the development becomes an actual city.
Poetically speaking, Mother Earth appears to first give birth to itself and next to many other celestials. Do notice other celestial bodies already have names of Gods. Earth had the right natural conditions and life kicks in through the development of an oxygen-rich atmosphere (by bacteria), a rich biosphere (by multicellular life), and a noosphere (by humanity). The relation between the origin of life (i.e. first cell) and the origin of meta-life goes back to experiments in the 1970s demonstrating how the world has a global metabolism: the Gaia hypothesis. The better we come to understand the self-actualization of life, the more a relationship is seen with the mystical dream force of effervescence.
For many hundreds of millennia, humans have been staring into the fire, before we now reach a development stage where fire-breathing rockets get us off this planet. Humanity has also been dreaming for several millennia about Gods, in this process humanity has grown exponentially and now dreaming is not taking millennia anymore. The Industrial Revolution, dating back to the Enlightenment was a self-actualizing dream of a few centuries. Today the need to reverse climate change is a dream we must self-actualize in decades. It appears the concentration of intelligence is reaching a threshold allowing the awakening of the Gods. The hive-mind experience and the global-mind experience are interesting, but not at the concentration of intelligence required for awakening the Gods. By turning to media technology we can gain deeper insights on this approaching threshold i.e. to see a stronger effect of effervescence.
We notice how the wisdom is given to the next generations, first as stories around the campfire, later by books. If we search for selling books, we notice how the top 10 reaches over 100 million people. Of course, we have the old religious books connecting billions across generations. One problem with such books is they are written in a time that has become alien to us and this makes flow with such dreams hard to reach. While these books reach the most people they are the hardest to get into a state of psychological flow sprinkled with effervescence. I need to acknowledge that religious stories were the last piece to get me into a cosmic-mind experience (in 2017). So I do not reject their relevance. I simply acknowledge it is one bridge too far for me with the current tools at my disposal.
In the past century audio and video have helped to accelerate collective knowledge. For example, Martin Luther King’s speech ”I Have a Dream” comes to mind. Audio has an interesting unique experience, as we explored with the clubhouse app during the lockdown in 2021. The numbers appear big but are still below the living-city threshold (i.e. 10 million people). We notice AI is a game changer. In 2023 hundred million people were using ChatGPT on a weekly basis, this did get into the range surpassing a living-city and being uniquely part of a global-mind. In contrast to the clubhouse app, ChatGPT did find global adoption, yet it stays in the realm of reasoning like the hive-mind and the relation to effervescence is unclear for now. One relation to AI and dream-force is given earlier by referring to symptoms of anxiety. For sure the next years are going to be interesting, revealing the veil around the concept of effervescence as the converging evolution continues.