The systems that govern our world are constantly evolving. Some gradually lose dominance and fade into distant memory while others have significant staying power and captivate the imagination of one generation after another. They not only come to inform collective identity, but also structure many aspects of our habits and habitat. Even the most dominant systems guided by leaders who exert tremendous power, at some point, are no longer able or suited to serve an evolved world. As this occurs, there are often innovations that emerge from within the system that gain attention, serve an under addressed need, draw a community together, and build wealth. In unique situations, these innovations become a key means of defining and grounding a new system of value that drives society, the economy, and politics. This book explores whether a digitally powered connection between the virtual and our physical world is just such an innovation and, if so, how it might structure a system that evolves from late capitalism.
In order to explore the role that a connection between the virtual and physical might play, I define these terms and the significant impact that digital innovation has had on the world in which we live. This is accompanied by a brief history of the relationship between the virtual and physical and how digital technology has impacted this connection. These initial reflections help to define a conceptual framework for the relationship between the virtual and physical that guides our investigation of a series of examples across scales, locales, and flows of things, capital, people, and ideas. This begins with the home and is followed by commerce, industry, agriculture, neighborhoods, cities, regions, and countries. In each instance, I explore the specific virtual/physical technologies that have been deployed as well as the positive and negative consequences of the deployment of the virtual/physical connection for a range of stakeholders as well as broader structures of power and the future of late capitalism. As I move between examples and across progressively larger scales, I call attention to the ways in which late capitalism is not addressing current challenges facing our society, government, and environment. In the context of and as a response to this failure, I argue that the digital ideology that has emerged from recent digital innovation will evolve to become a virtual/digital ideology that can guide the evolution of late capitalism and support an ability to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our society and world.
A key component of such an ideology is the value created in the exchange between the virtual and physical. Through identifying how this value is created and tracked, it becomes possible to explore ways of optimizing this value and using this value to support community, new routes of investment, new means of representation of individuals and collectives, and greater equity and ownership of the systems that govern our world. In the end, the way in which we measure and cultivate this value forms a means of elucidating a cohesive system that relates to and maybe even replaces earlier systems that structured our economy and politics.
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